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🇦🇷 Argentina /Elections & Politics

Rekha Sharma, lawyer: ‘USCIS actions are causing panic as a wave of applications faces rejection’

From La Nación · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources In the courts
  • The American Immigration Lawyers Association and Benach Pitney Reilly filed a class-action lawsuit against USCIS over its immediate adoption of a new financial sponsorship form.
  • The plaintiffs say USCIS failed to provide a public comment period and that technical problems on its website complicated submissions.
  • The revised form requires sponsors to authorize checks of their credit history and financial score, which the lawyers say intrudes on applicants’ privacy.

A new USCIS financial sponsorship form has triggered a legal challenge and warnings of widespread application rejections from immigration lawyer Rekha Sharma-Crawford.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association and the law firm Benach Pitney Reilly filed a class-action lawsuit against U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The case challenges the agency’s decision to require the new version of Form I-864 immediately, without a grace period for applicants using the previous edition.

The association’s second vice president, Sharma-Crawford, said the sudden change was already creating fear among immigrants, families, employers and communities. “This is the second time in 17 months that the administration has tried to weaponize its executive power to directly harm immigrants, families, employers and communities across the nation,” she said.

The new form is dated Aug. 24, 2026. USCIS published the updated documents on Aug. 31 and declared them valid immediately. The plaintiffs argue that the agency violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act by skipping a prior public consultation process.

They say the lack of timely notice could lead to the automatic rejection of hundreds of mailed applications completed with earlier versions of the documents. The group also alleges that errors on the USCIS website prevented applicants from completing required text fields, forcing professionals to transcribe information manually.

The revised form introduces a substantive change to the sponsorship process. Sponsors must authorize the government to investigate their credit history and consult their financial score. The plaintiffs argue that the change turns a demonstration of income and assets into an intrusion into citizens’ privacy.

This is the second time in 17 months that the administration has tried to weaponize its executive power to directly harm immigrants, families, employers and communities across the nation.

· Rekha Sharma-CrawfordShe criticized USCIS’s immediate implementation of the revised financial sponsorship form in the lawsuit.
About this summary

Originally published by La Nación in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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