Effective December 31, 2021, the United States began permitting noncitizen arrivals from Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. A Presidential Proclamation went into effect on November 29, 2021, suspending entry into the United States for individuals who were present in the aforementioned Southern Africa countries within a 14-day window before their planned date of entry. The Presidential Proclamation was a result of the World Health Organization’s report identifying an area of increased presence of COVID-19 variants in ...
Employment Authorization Document (EAD) processing times have been severely delayed in recent years, rendering certain dependent nonimmigrants temporarily ineligible to work and causing gaps in some U.S. employers’ workforces. An EAD can take over 12 months for adjudication under current processing times. Recently, USICS issued guidance expanding its automatic EAD extension rules to apply to additional foreign nationals. The agency further confirmed L-2 and E-2 dependent spouses are considered eligible to work “incident to status,” meaning they no longer require ...