Immigration Updates — July 14, 2026.

E-signatures become fatal; another week, another TPS reverification update; it’s still hard finding that seasonal work; and Republicans won’t let go of the birthright citizenship thing.

Just use a printer and pen.

USCIS has tightened the stakes around signatures on immigration filings. On July 10, 2026, new Policy Manual guidance took effect, following a May 2026 interim final rule on signature requirements. If USCIS accepts a filing and later decides it does not contain a valid signature, the agency may reject or _deny _the request. If it denies the filing, USCIS may keep the filing fee and treat the case as fully adjudicated.

That makes signatures more than an administrative detail. A missing, copied, pasted, or otherwise defective signature may no longer be caught only at the lockbox stage, where the package can be corrected and resubmitted. It could instead become a denial risk after the case is already in the system, with the added cost of lost fees, refiling, delay, or appeal.

Confirm who is authorized to sign and how wet signatures are collected, and retain the original. Or risk losing your time, money, and your case.

We’ll talk about this again in a week.

Those following the long-running saga regarding terminations of Temporary Protected Status programs have been experiencing it first as a looming termination issue, then as an employer I-9/E-Verify problem, and now as a struggle to determine how to align court orders, agency systems, and HR obligations. The newest July 10 USCIS guidance keeps that theme going. For Haiti, USCIS now instructs employers to use July 24, 2026 as the Form I-9/E-Verify date; for Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, USCIS points to July 17, 2026. These are not broad new TPS extensions or stable long-term solutions. They are short, court-order-based validity dates while lower courts respond to the Supreme Court’s June 25, 2026 TPS decision in Mullin v. Doe.

Employers should continue to keep tabs on employees whose work authorization depends on TPS from one of these countries, confirm their EAD category and original expiration date, update I-9/E-Verify records exactly as USCIS instructs, and keep checking for new guidance. There will most likely be another update next week, and the weeks following until who knows.

Of crawfish and waitstaff

H-2B is the immigration system behind seasonal experiences we do not always associate with immigration, but that make perfect sense once we stop to think about them: crawfish boils, beach hotels, landscaping crews, resorts, summer tourism, and more. Because the number of H-2B visas is capped each year, the program can affect whether seasonal businesses have enough workers to process seafood, staff hotels, maintain resort grounds, or meet peak customer demand. In Louisiana’s crawfish industry, for example, processors have reported that H-2B delays and limits left them short-staffed during peak season, affecting a local food economy tied to restaurants, grocery stores, and tourism. AP Newså

Demand often exceeds supply, and this year is no exception. On July 8, 2026, the Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) reported 2,625 applications covering 51,158 requested worker positions for October 1 start dates, far above the 33,000 first-half H-2B allotment. OFLC randomized the filings into review groups: Group A goes first and alone contains enough requested workers to use up the cap; Group B, with another 744 cases, waits behind it. This kind of oversubscription is common in peak H-2B cycles such as the present.

Note that this is only the beginning of the process. Before workers can actually arrive, employers still have to move through DOL recruitment and certification, USCIS petitioning, consular processing, travel, onboarding, and the visa cap itself.

Make America Smaller Again

A Republican House Representative introduced a bill making a play for that Brett Kavanaugh vote to end birthright citizenship. The strategy being that, if it somehow passes and gets signed into law, it could survive a legal challenge under the theory, espoused by Kavanaugh, that the problem with ending birthright citizenship isn’t the constitution, but congressional law. Even so, winning over Kavanaugh would only move the needle from 6-3 to 5-4: still short of a majority. Which is nevertheless shockingly close.

Matthew Blaisdell, Esq.
Sunset Immigration PLLC
219 36th Street, Ste 511
Brooklyn, NY 11232
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