Two latest developments with regards to the extreme hardship waivers would allow many applicants to apply and should also result in the approval of higher proportion for the well-prepared applicants. Primarily, USCIS announced that the process of provisional waiver will be made accessible to all the people who have immigrant visa available regardless of status from petitioner. This proposal has considerably expanded the eligibility of applying for provisional waiver that was previously limited to the beneficiaries of the relative visa petitions, especially the spouse or parent-child petitions from the US citizens.
Under the new rule all the people with approved petition and the available visa regardless of category of visa would be eligible for participating in provisional waiver program if otherwise eligible. Obtaining the provisional waiver requires extreme hardship to the US citizen or legal permanent resident parent or spouse.
The second change which involves that how the USCIS would judge the extreme hardship and the USCIS might relax the standard of extreme hardship. On 7th October 2015, USCIS dispersed a memorandum of draft policy and if that will be made effective, then it will impact the way of agency making the decisions on the applications for the waivers under extreme hardship. New policy would impact all waiver applications types which also includes waivers for the unlawful presence including the provisional waiver for the criminal convictions and for the misrepresentations.
The new policy shall be interesting for the people who have filed for waivers in the precedent and had their applications for denial or to the people who didn’t file waiver applications as they were worried that they will be unable to establish the needed level of extreme hardship. It will be beneficial to the new waiver applicants in the future.
To get eligible for the permanent residency in the US, the person should be permissible under the Act of Immigration and Nationality. USCIS had recognized that some of the hardship will be resulting if any family member is not permitted to reside in the US with their other family members, or if the legal permanent relative or US citizen might relocate to the foreign country to join their parent, spouse or child. This is the case USCIS says that the extreme hardship that increases above and beyond the levels of hardship which is expected under any one scenario.
The new policy has provided the guidance to the USCIS officers about the factor which will support, suggest and support the finding of extreme hardship.
