The great news is that we get to say goodbye to form I-944 and all the extra hurdles that were created by the public charge final rule. I posted a video the other day on the ninth of March announcing the great news of the Biden administration withdrawing the appeal in Supreme Court. Watch that video if you want more context and more background.

Watch: GREAT NEWS! Public Charge Updates (March 2021)

USCIS officially announced on their website that I-944 is no longer required. If you’re filing your application for adjustment of status in the United States, you no longer have to submit that form. This is great news because that form is very long and it doubled the size of the adjustment applications we were sending. Very invasive. Asking for credit scores and debts and assets.

See: I-944, Declaration of Self Sufficiency

Immigration will be updating other forms that had references as well to these new public charge final rules. One of the forms will be form I-485. There was a reference in there about whether or not you were exempt from public charge. They’ll be updating those forms as well. We’ll see revisions in those forms and announcement from USCIS in the coming days or weeks.

There will be some other changes that will occur on other forms as well. What this means is you don’t have to submit that form and you won’t have to submit any of that other additional evidence proof of credit score information about debts and assets and anything that was required by that form is no longer required.

An important question we’ve been getting is, “I filed my application with form I-944. What will happen? Will they still review that?” If you submitted your application with form I-944, that means immigration is not going to review that. They have announced on their website they’re just going to ignore that part of the application. They’re not going to make a decision and they’re not going to consider that information.

If you have received a request for evidence or a notice of intent to deny and it’s requesting information for form I-944, you do not have to respond to the part that is asking for information about form I-944. If it was asking for more supporting evidence of assets or debts or something along those lines, immigration has announced on their website that you don’t have to respond to that.

However, be very careful. If your request for evidence asks for other information about your relationship or some other part of your application, you still have to respond to that. If you aren’t sure if you need to respond or not or if you don’t understand your request for evidence, please talk to an immigration attorney. You can schedule an appointment with our attorneys through the link below.

Appointment Scheduling with Corado-Pastrana LLC

But in general, if they were asking for a form I-944 or additional evidence on that application or that form, that’s not required. A lot of people are asking, “Does this mean that the I-864 affidavit of support is going to change? Do I still have to submit that form? Will this change the income requirements?”

The short answer is no. The income requirements aren’t going to change. You still need to submit form I-864. This new announcement, the withdrawal of the appeal by the Biden administration, it’s not eliminating the public charge ground of inadmissibility completely. Applicants still are subject to public charge and that they still have to file form I-864. They still have to comply with what the rules were pre-February 24th of 2020. It doesn’t change anything on that front but this is still really great news.