Department of State

Subscribe to Department of State via RSS

USCIS is resuming the Cuban Family Reunification Parole (CFRP) Program beginning with already pending CFRP applications. This program started in 2007 and has been on hold for some time. It allows beneficiaries of approved Forms I-130, Petitions for Alien Relative, to come to the United States on parole while waiting for an available visa number. …

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is trying to approve as many employment-based green card applications as it can before the annual deadline of September 30, 2022 (the end of the fiscal year).

Primarily due to COVID-19 restrictions, approximately 140,000 family-based visa numbers went unused last fiscal year. As a result, these unused visa numbers…

The Department of State (DOS) has reinstituted talks with Cuban representatives about how to support family reunification and safe, orderly migration from Cuba to the United States.

Talks of this nature were instituted in 1984 and continued biannually from 1994 until 2018 when the talks were paused by the Trump Administration.

The Biden Administration is…

Starting April 25, 2022, the “Uniting for Ukraine” program for Ukrainians seeking to enter the United States will allow Ukrainians who are sponsored by family members or non-governmental agencies to come to the United States and apply for a two-year humanitarian parole.

While humanitarian parole does not offer a direct pathway to long-term residence in…

As they did for last summer, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL) will make available an additional 35,000 H-2B temporary nonagricultural worker visas for the second half of FY 2022. This more than doubles the usual 33,000 allocation or cap for the summer.

Of the new 35,000 visas,…

The United States has joined many European countries that are opening their doors and offering humanitarian assistance to fleeing Ukrainians.

Ireland, Great Britain and Canada have all started private sponsorship programs for Ukrainians. That assistance is not necessarily a one-way street. Easing the way for incoming Ukrainians may help those nations deal with their own…

As 2021 comes to an end, the White House and the Department of State have announced:

  1. South African Travel Restrictions Lifted.

The 14-day travel restrictions on southern African countries will be lifted as of midnight on December 31, 2021. Adopted on November 29th, the restrictions based on spread of the COVID-19 Omicron variant…

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it plans to add mandatory social media collection to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) process.

ESTA is an automated online system that makes an initial determination about a visitor’s eligibility to travel to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). The VWP…

U.S. passport agencies maintained extremely limited operations as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were significant delays, application status could not even be checked online and people were encouraged to wait to apply until normal operations resumed absent life or death emergencies. In June 2020, the agency started resuming regular operations with a…

As of 12:01 a.m. ET on November 8, 2021, the United States’ country-specific 14-day COVID-19 travel restrictions that have been so troublesome and disruptive for individuals and businesses will be eliminated. Instead, protecting the country from COVID-19 will focus on vaccination status.

President Joe Biden’s “A Proclamation on Advancing the Safe Resumption of Global…