Recent industry concerns, including an American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) Practice Alert, state that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is reportedly rejecting I-485 filings for allegedly missing signature pages or other intake and scanning issues, even when the original submission included the documents.
AILA also said it has received reports of improper rejections of Form I-485 applications postmarked before Sept. 18, 2026, even when the filing packages appeared to meet the applicable filing requirements.
To better understand how these issues are affecting practitioners, we asked professionals across the EB-5 industry what they are experiencing.
What EB-5 attorneys are seeing
While not every attorney consulted has encountered the specific I-485 signature-page issue identified by AILA, they described broader uncertainty, unnecessary refiling, delays, and added burdens for clients and firms.
These concerns include unexplained rejections, requests for documents that were already submitted, unannounced form changes, and shortened response deadlines.
One lawyer described how an intake issue involving a concurrently filed petition led to an unnecessary delay:
“We had one I-485 get returned due to not having the base petition (I-526E) in the record even though it was filed concurrently,” Austin Kim of H&H Law said. “We had to wait for the receipt notice to arrive before we could file the I-485 again. We also had I-526E petitions returned due to the filing fees not getting approved, even though the bank never denied the transactions.”
Other practitioners reported different types of processing problems. Belma Demirovic Chinchoy of Iyer Demirovic Chinchoy LLP said her practice has not encountered the I-485 issues AILA highlighted in its recent filings. However, one I-765 was rejected without an apparent reason and had to be refiled.
“One rejection did not disrupt our workflow, but errors at this basic level are frustrating and avoidable,” she said.
The rejection occurred amid a separate wave of I-485 requests for evidence (RFEs) issued in September. These RFEs requested medical examinations even when applicants had already submitted valid medical forms.
“We received at least a dozen, all in cases where the I-693 was submitted with the initial filing and was still valid when the RFE was issued,” Demirovic said.
Responding to those RFEs during the September 30 crunch, driven by the EB-5 grandfathering deadline, added pressure for both attorneys and clients. “Clients had to scramble to obtain new medical exams unnecessarily.”
Demirovic also pointed to shortened response periods as another source of disruption. She noted that USCIS requests for evidence (RFEs) now routinely allow just four weeks for a response, despite the agency’s own guidance generally permitting 84 days. This significantly disrupts attorneys’ workflows and clients’ ability to prepare.
USCIS form version confusion leads to inconsistent I-485 rejections
Form-version changes have created another potential source of rejection. U.S. immigration attorney Kyle Mitchell of Kyle D. Mitchell Esq. described how changes to the I-485 form’s OMB expiration date affected filings prepared before the revised version became publicly apparent.
“When USCIS released the Sept. 18, 2026, edition of the I-485, the OMB expiration printed on the form was subsequently changed without any public alert at least twice. Attorneys (including myself) who use case management platforms like Docketwise often prepare the I-485 days or weeks before filing, so packages went out using a version that had been superseded between preparation and mailing.”
As a result, filings prepared using an apparently current form could still be rejected at intake:
“Consequently, many of those filings were rejected at intake even though the I-485 form was current when completed, and no one notified them that this version would be rejected.”
Mitchell added that, fortunately, USCIS accepted all his filings, but several attorneys who submitted filings using the same “outdated version” he did told him theirs had been rejected.
He said the inconsistent outcomes have made attorneys more cautious when preparing subsequent filings:
“This may be because USCIS is being inconsistent or perhaps they internally stopped rejecting based on those reasons. In my latest filing, after hearing about the issue, I compared the current I-485 against my existing template and ended up transferring all the information over because there were slight differences in the form version, just to be safe.
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