Immigration paperwork changed twice this week, once for the people who file it and once for the employers who pay for it. The half that takes effect today is an interim final rule from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, published in this morning's Federal Register at 91 FR 51924, authorizing the agency to make electronic filing mandatory for immigration benefit requests, form by form [1].
The rule does not name any form that must be e-filed yet; it builds the machine that will. Under the new framework, USCIS can mandate e-filing for a form once it has been available electronically for at least 180 days [1]. As of December 16, 2025, that describes 22 of the agency's more than 100 forms [1]. When the agency decides to flip the switch on one, the announcement will not run in the Federal Register: "USCIS will publish notification of the e-filing requirement on its website and provide an additional 60-day grace period for individuals to comply with the e-filing requirement" [1].
The waiver process is where the rule touches people who cannot get online, and it is the load-bearing detail. A requestor seeking to file on paper after a mandate takes effect must first submit Form I-936, Request for Waiver of E-Filing Requirement, with a $25 fee [1]. The standard is discretionary: "USCIS may exercise its discretion to waive the e-filing mandate for individual cases if USCIS determines requiring e-filing would cause the requestor undue hardship" [1]. Waivers of the $25 fee itself are available only where a statute requires them; DHS considered permitting them more broadly and decided against it, reasoning that the fee recovers processing costs and may "potentially deter frivolous waiver filings" [1]. The department's own economic analysis prices the new burden: requestors will incur about $15 million annually in costs related to the waiver form, against roughly $533 million in estimated annual savings from e-filing overall [1].
The agency's adoption numbers say who this lands on. In FY 2025, USCIS received approximately 44 percent of applications through an e-filing method [1]. Individuals were not the holdouts: about 43 percent of individual requestors voluntarily filed online when it was available, while less than six percent of attorneys and accredited representatives did the same [1]. The preamble also concedes a blind spot in plain terms, acknowledging that DHS "does not have internet accessibility data specific to USCIS benefit requestors" [1].
The paper pipeline the rule aims to retire is expensive and error-prone by the agency's own accounting. USCIS rejected over 1 million paper benefit requests in FY 2025 and spent $10,864,781 on postage to move paper through its process [1]. The rule took effect on publication, without advance notice and comment; DHS's position is that good cause supports immediate effect, in part because any actual e-filing mandate carries its own built-in runway of at least 60 days [1]. Comments are open until October 13, 2026, which matters because the waiver standard, the $25 fee, and the website-only notice mechanism are all details commenters can still contest [1].
The second change lands on employers. A final rule published in yesterday's Federal Register, effective September 9, extends the 9-11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee to all H-1B and L-1 extension-of-status petitions filed by covered employers, including same-employer extensions that previously carried no fee; in the rule's words, the change reaches "all extension of status petitions, regardless of whether the related fraud prevention and detection fee applies, which includes extension of status petitions that do not involve a change of employer" [2]. The rule's text confirms the figures that had circulated in secondary alerts: the fee is $4,000 per H-1B petition and $4,500 per L-1 petition under the 2015 statute that created it, and a covered employer is one with 50 or more employees in the United States, more than half of them in H-1B or L-1 status [2]. We covered that rule and its revenue history yesterday; the short version is that a fee projected to raise $420 million a year collected $25.6 million in FY 2025, and the extension petitions this rule now reaches are where the volume went [2].
The through line is administrative. DHS spent the week closing gaps between what its rules assumed and what filers actually do. Employers who structured their filings around the biometric fee get a September 9 date. An applicant without reliable internet gets a $25 form, a discretionary standard, and 60 days' notice on a website the rule assumes they can reach.
