By Sharif Silmi
USCIS just walked away from both paths to a tougher standard. If you spent the last year reacting to rumors, here’s your lesson.
Stop reacting to every rumor. And stop taking advice on complex immigration matters from your cousin, your coworker, or a group chat. If the last year proved anything, it proved that.
For a year, EB-1A and NIW applicants braced for a rule that would raise the bar. People panicked. They rushed filings, restructured cases, and made life-altering decisions based on Reddit threads and secondhand speculation. Meanwhile, as one who actually reads regulations for a living, tracks OIRA publications, litigates against USCIS, and holds denials up against the statute, our firm kept saying the same thing: nothing has changed yet, and it may never change at all.
We were right. Here’s the proof, with receipts.
The rule everyone feared just vanished from the government’s own books
Don’t take my word for it. Go look.
Over the holiday weekend, OIRA published the updated 2026 Unified Regulatory Agenda, the government’s official, legally significant list of every regulation it intends to issue. The rule that fueled a year of panic, “Petition for Immigrant Worker Reforms” (RIN 1615-AC85), is not on it. Pull up the full DHS rule list in the current agenda yourself: nineteen active USCIS rules — H-1B reform, fee increases, public charge — and the EB-1A/NIW rule is not among them.
Why does a missing line on a government website matter? Because under Executive Order 14192, an agency generally cannot issue a regulation that doesn’t appear on the most recent Unified Agenda. This wasn’t a delay. It was never acted upon, meaning the vehicle for codifying Kazarian, tightening evidentiary standards, and raising the “extraordinary ability” bar is, for now, off the road entirely. No vehicle, no rule. The rumor mill spent a year narrating a crackdown; the primary source just deleted its premise.
That’s the difference between rumor and record. Your neighbor forwards a WhatsApp screenshot. We read the Federal Register.
USCIS also just blinked in court
The second path to a tougher standard ran through litigation and USCIS abandoned that one too.
In Mukherji v. Miller, a federal district court in Nebraska relied on Loper Bright to overturn an EB-1A denial built on USCIS’s “final merits determination,” holding that the agency had grafted a second evaluative step onto the adjudication, one never adopted through notice-and-comment rulemaking under the APA. USCIS appealed to the Eighth Circuit. Then it quietly withdrew the appeal, leaving the district court’s ruling intact for that petitioner.
Read those two moves together. In short order, USCIS dropped the rulemaking that would have codified a heightened EB-1A/NIW standard and pulled the appeal that could have won appellate blessing for the adjudicatory step at its center. Why? It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: the rules of the game are not changing.
And notice how that ruling happened. It didn’t come from a Telegram group. It came from a petitioner whose lawyers knew the APA, knew Loper Bright, and forced a federal court to measure USCIS against the actual regulations. That is what lawyering looks like.
So why are approvals down? Look in the mirror, not at USCIS
Here’s the uncomfortable part nobody selling panic will tell you: there has been little to no change in USCIS adjudication practice. The drop in approvals has three causes, and none of them is a secret policy shift.
Petitioners are DIYing cases that were never DIY cases. Lawyers have stopped lawyering — filing thin, templated petitions and hoping volume beats scrutiny. And the applicant pool has increased, pulling in filings that were never viable under any standard. A weak petition denied under the same rules that existed five years ago is not evidence of a crackdown. It’s evidence of a weak petition.
This is why the source of your advice is not a detail, it’s the whole game. Your cousin who “got his green card in 2019” doesn’t know what the Policy Manual requires. The Reddit thread doesn’t know your record. And the rumor economy profits from your fear, not your approval.
The Silmi Law standard
Our position hasn’t moved, because it doesn’t move with the news cycle: petitioners deserve legally sufficient decisions grounded in a uniquely tailored approach that addresses the statute, the regulations and the USCIS Policy Manual, and the agency must be held accountable through RFEs answered with details and precision, through motions, through federal court when necessary.
You can’t hold anyone accountable when your strategy comes from rumor mills and your legal advice comes from people who don’t practice law. Every hour spent panicking over a rule that never materialized was an hour not spent building the record that actually decides your case.
Ignore the noise. Read the record. And when the stakes are your future in this country, hire someone whose job is to know the difference.
Sharif Silmi is the managing attorney of Silmi Law, an immigration law firm focused on extraordinary ability and national interest waiver petitions. This article is intended for informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice for any specific matter.
