Retired USCIS Officer Shares 2026 Immigration Changes: Denaturalization, F-1/J-1 Status, and More

TLDR:

• Retired 33-year USCIS supervisory officer Douglas Pierce joined Jennifer Behm to unpack the biggest immigration policy shifts of 2025: rising denaturalization enforcement, the end of “duration of status” for F-1/J-1 students, the rescinded public charge rule, and ongoing litigation over the $100,000 H-1B fee.
• The throughline across every topic is officer discretion. USCIS is pushing more case-by-case decision-making down to individual officers, making it harder to challenge policy on a national scale and putting more weight on how well a case is documented.
• Pierce’s key takeaway for practitioners and applicants: build a clear, coherent narrative tied directly to the evidence, don’t rely on legal jargon or assume the adjudicator is a lawyer.

Transcript:

Jennifer Behm: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining the Immigration Inside Scoop today on July 28th. I am thrilled to be here today with Douglas S. Pierce. Doug, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Of course. We have lots to discuss today. Before we get started, I’d just like to give Doug a very gracious introduction because he has some really cool background and accomplishments that I want to highlight for our listeners. So for those of you who don’t follow Doug on LinkedIn, he is a retired USCIS officer from the Detroit field office. And Doug served as a supervisory immigration services officer for more than thirty three years of service with USCIS and its predecessor agency, the Immigration and National Naturalization Service. In Doug’s long and distinguished career, he served as an immigration inspector at the Miami airport. for three years from nineteen ninety two as a district adjudications officer in the Detroit district from 1995 until 2005. A nice run there. And as a supervisor for the remainder of his career, with a brief stint as a section chief during that time. Doug, I understand you specialized in naturalization, denaturalization, which we’ll chat about a little bit today and other federal litigation. citizenship, family-based adjustment of status applications, and in teaching and training fellow officers on USCIS policy and procedures. So thank you very much, Doug, for joining us. I also want to acknowledge that you are a veteran of Operations Desert Shield and Storm. So thank you very much for your service. We always appreciate the service members. Thank you. Appreciate it. 

Douglas Pierce: I was proud to serve my country. Yes.

Jennifer Behm: Great. Well, let’s we’ve got a lot to cover today. So let’s start off with denaturalization. I know you’ve posted a bit about that in the last few weeks on LinkedIn. And we know that this Trump two point zero administration has made denaturalization an explicit enforcement priority. DHS issues a press release every time the agency files a denaturalization case in federal court. And on July, that press release covered ten cases, most charged just this June and July. So the last two months, and we see this as definitely a more intentional, broader push. So let’s talk a little bit about the numbers. What have we seen from Trump? One point? Oh, then the Biden administration. And now we understand the current administration is floating a target of 1,000 denaturalization cases a year. Do you see a pattern in cases that are being selected? What are your thoughts on all of this?

Douglas Pierce: Well, sure. So I do think that there’s a conscious decision by the current administration to make this a very public endeavor to kind of put bite in the idea that there’s consequences for fraud and false testimony and that sort of thing. And the thing is, is the agency, you know, regardless of the administration, has been building a list of potential denaturalization candidates for almost a decade now, I’d say. And that list, I mean, U.S., as an officer and as a supervisor, I always felt that we should be pursuing, that the agencies should be pursuing denaturalization in many more cases than we did. I mean, when you look at the raw, raw numbers from 2000 to 2024, over 18 million people were naturalized within four hundred applications. So that roughly came out to about 728,000 people per year when you break it down on a yearly basis. And then when you look at it over that same time period, on average, And it varied by administration a little bit, but about 17.5 cases per year were pursued for denaturalization over that same time period for much of that. Before the first Trump administration, it was roughly eleven cases per year. And then the first Trump administration, they ramped it up to like forty two. And then in the current in the Biden administration, it was back down to about sixteen. And then, of course, in the current Trump administration, those numbers are starting to skyrocket. So. Absolutely, it’s an initiative on their part. I think it’s part of some of the scare tactics that I think that they engage in in general with immigration. But it’s also they want to put the idea in people’s heads on a public level that there’s consequences to the fraud and misrepresentation that happen in some cases. When you talk about 18 million cases, Not everybody’s telling the truth, right? And no matter how good and how detailed the background checks are that are conducted on people, you can’t account for stuff that actually hasn’t happened yet, enforcement actions that haven’t been taken. But the conspiracies or the crimes that lead to those enforcement actions may have been happening all along during the naturalization process or before. So I would definitely say that it’s a conscious priority. It’s something that works toward their advantage to create that little bit of fear that they want folks to have.

Jennifer Behm: And to your point, I always tell clients who are filing naturalization cases, and because our firm is primarily employment-based. We’re very selective with the naturalization cases we take. And for the most part, I call them, you know, I kind of dubbed it a very vanilla sort of group of clients that we have in our practice. We don’t have a ton of complex naturalization cases. But to that end, when we’re talking about this group of individuals or just this group of this topic in general, do you think that the government is going after individuals a certain pattern or certain individuals of a certain background in identifying and reviewing those cases? Cause those are big numbers, right? So where are they starting? Is it, is it when criminal activity comes up afterwards and they’re looking backwards at someone’s record? Can you walk us through a little bit of that process and maybe how it’s changed since you’ve retired?

Douglas Pierce: Sure. So I think, you know, the government, regardless of administration, is always going to prioritize, say, terrorists, people that are discovered to be involved in national security stuff that we didn’t know about. Criminal conspiracies, now those can range from anything like Medicare fraud that maybe takes years to develop and for a case to mature to the point where they can bring charges against somebody. And And then, so, Medicare fraud, you know, large-scale, you know, financial fraud, criminal conspiracies that involve drug operations. Obviously, the current administration places a lot of emphasis on trying to stop illegal narcotics from coming into this country. Gang activity, you know, again, something where somebody might not have been arrested but has been a part of or part of an organization or a cartel. So, So those are priorities that are going to be there regardless. I think the current administration is a lot more focused on, say, the drug stuff, the criminal stuff, and anything terrorism. But also, I think they take it seriously, the business fraud type stuff. And so, you know, if they can get a headline, you know, and especially if they can find somebody that was naturalized in the prior administration, their stories that they put out are going to highlight this Biden-era case or this Obama-era case. Now, they don’t highlight it quite as much as when it was under Trump one, but they do. But they do under the perceived antagonistic administrations that they want. So that’s, I think, the most shocking and biggest change is the politicization of these announcements. I mean, if a person’s a criminal, they’re a criminal. If they’re a terrorist, they’re a terrorist. What administration are they naturalized under? Doesn’t really matter because at some point in the future, there’s going to be a bunch of denaturalizations coming from this current Trump administration.

Jennifer Behm: And again, USCIS is not a politically appointed agency, right? It’s not.

Douglas Pierce: Well, except for the leadership in the agency. And they have politicized the news announcements, which is really a shame. Yeah. That’s, I think, been the biggest… One of my bigger disappointments is the politicization of these announcements. You can just say, hey, this person naturalized in 2018 or they naturalized in twenty twenty two. Doesn’t matter what administration was in power and just focus on the facts of the case and that you’re taking action against it now. That’s what they should be doing. Right. So. 

Jennifer Behm: Interesting stuff. Well, let’s, let’s kind of swing our conversation towards those beginning their immigration journey, right? So let’s chat quickly about F-1 students coming to the United States and also J-1 visas. In mid July, Department of Homeland Security issued a final rule that ends the duration of status or D/S on I-94 records as the length of admission for F-1 and J visa holders. And the big change there is that instead of an open-ended admission tied to their maintaining status, going to classes full-time, students now get a fixed admission date on their I-94 with the F-1 program capped at 4 years total. This is a really big shift for higher education, and it’s going to have a heavy impact falling on graduate students at universities who often go on to their careers in tech and medicine. But going to your experience as a USCIS adjudicator, what do you think the fallout or consequences are going to be for officers who are adjudicating immigration benefits for students in the next few years? How do you think this is going to impact the agency’s adjudications practices?

Douglas Pierce: Well, it’ll be a lot easier, I suppose, to determine when a student… has fallen out of status or, or, you know, they’ve stayed past their, their end date rather than trying to examine the school documents. Were they, you know, on OPT, were they on, you know, did they continue with like graduate studies that were not quite, you know, you don’t have to look at how many credits they were taking or whatever. It’s just, Were they attending school? And what was the end date of their I-94? So perhaps it’ll be a little easier for officers to sort out the end dates and whether somebody basically fell out of status. So perhaps it’ll be a little easier for officers. But I think the downside of it all, you know, for our country is is that it’s going to discourage and make it harder for people to come here and do student stuff, right? And we get a lot of some of our highest scientists and other types of engineers and stuff like that who come here on graduate programs and contribute to high levels at various schools. And then they go on to OPT and job offers and such. And all of that’s going to be a bit more difficult now. Yeah. And, you know, easier for them to fall out of status and then make it harder for them to adjust status as an employment-based immigrant.

Jennifer Behm: Well, and the I-539 filing is not, I mean, that’s one more thing that foreign students do. Again, they’re not always well-educated or… maybe their universities aren’t providing them with the most up-to-date or accurate guidance in terms of maintaining their status, right? And so I am very curious to see how USCIS will handle what presumably is going to be an influx of I-539s by students. And if those aren’t adjudicated timely, then students aren’t going to be able to start their classes timely. And I just see this becoming like a very muddy situation for both universities, students, and also the agency, which we know processing times are not always a highlight for them.

Douglas Pierce: And there’s a word that we’re going to use later on with some of the other topics we’re going to talk about, discretion, right? And so the I-539 is a very discretionary benefit that USCIS is not required to approve a change of status or an extension of status. There’s a lot of discretion there. Sure thing. And There’s a conscious move in this administration to advance as much discretion to officers as possible, at least publicly. And then we’ll talk about how some of that then is taken away in hidden ways. 

Jennifer Behm: Right. And plays out in final decisions. Sure. Yeah. Well, that moves us on to another recent headline, DHS issuing a final rule that rescinded the Biden administration’s 2022 public charge rule. So now we’re going on to the topic of green cards. And so for context, proving that you’re not going to be a public charge to the United States, relying on government welfare benefits, for example, has always been a standing requirement, right? It means the government does not want to quickly approve green card applications for those applicants who are going to become dependent on cash assistance and long-term institutional care. So when Trump came into play, they expanded that definition in to also include non-cash benefits like Medicaid, which made adjustment of status green card denials easier. That rule got tied up in court.  And so when the Biden administration came in, they stopped enforcing it. They replaced it with a rule that reverted back to the previous 1999 standard. And that has been in place up to today until last week. Trump finalized a rule rescinding that standard. But what’s really interesting here is that there’s been barely any replacement guidance published yet. Just again, to your discretion point that you just mentioned, officers will have broader case-by-case discretionary latitude in issuing these decisions. So how do you expect officers will fill that guidance gap in practice? Do we expect more guidance? Or do we think this will become sort of that same inconsistency we saw with the earlier iOS discretionary memo, which had everybody sort of in a frenzy and then sort of seems to have calmed down since then. Right. 

Douglas Pierce: I think it’s going to be closer to the last option there where each office and maybe even each supervisory team will have slightly different takes on what levels of discretion do the officers really have, what levels do they want to allow their officers to use. Right. And there’s going to be some offices that take a harder line and there’s going to be some offices that say, well, they haven’t given us any, so do the best you can with what you got. And so then it could come down to an individual officer level. But of course, you know, if you’re issuing a discretionary denial as an officer from an office, that’s generally going to have, well, it’s going to have the field office director’s name on that decision. It’s not going to have my name. It’s not going to have the officer’s name. So generally field office directors get a little touchy when people start willy nilly denying things with their name on it. So, um, so there’s, there’s usually going to be some standards applied on an office level to make sure that some really crazy stuff isn’t sent out. And, you know, and so I know at one point in my career, the field office director was like, yeah, if anybody sends, if you’re issuing a discretionary denial, I want to, I want to know about it. And I totally respected that and we didn’t issue a whole lot of those kinds of discretionary denials, but you know, I’ve seen some discretionary denials from the, from the, from the adjustment of status memo that came out, um, you know, issued by one office. And so, and then I know in talking to people from my old office that they haven’t done that very much at all, you know, So I think it’s going to be the same kind of office by office, team by team, even down to officer by officer interpretation of that. And so, but again, it’s, you know, the administration is publicly moving towards that. This is, you know, there’s going to be officer discretion. What that does in practice means that it’s, you know, that the fights that take place between the private bar and the agency on some of these decisions are going to happen on an individual case basis rather than a policy basis where if a memo comes out and says these are the standards that apply to everybody, you can fight that. And district court judges can stop those things with orders and stuff like that. But you can issue a thing that says, eh, officers have discretion. And now it’s not where, how do you fight that on a national or broad scale? Because it’s written into the law, first of all, there is a lot of discretion. And the facts that are applying and being used in this case are not necessarily going to be applying to other cases across the country and in different offices and such like that. So I think the discretion is a huge part of it because it makes it harder to fight some of these policy memo decisions. 

Jennifer Behm: Yeah, without a doubt. And speaking from the practitioner standpoint, I’m always trying to relay realities and set my clients expectations, never over promise. This is, you know, a time of, we just don’t necessarily know, but Doug, I’m wondering, can you walk us through from your experience in the time that you were in these offices? Is there a sort of standardized process for working at the officer level? You interview applicants. You sort of know, okay, this is a case that is not approvable. What is the sort of internal process for you bringing that to the field office director? Is there one? From a process procedural standpoint, are there guardrails? What does that look like? Just so immigration attorneys kind of know and have some insight into that. 

Douglas Pierce: Yeah, so first of all, it’s generally going to start with an officer thinking, okay, this case looks to be deniable. After their interview, they’re going to maybe consult with one of the senior officers or a more knowledgeable member of their team to make sure that they’re seeing things right to see that they didn’t miss anything. And then they’ll often speak with their supervisor. And when I was a supervisor, what I would say is, Sit down. If you think a case is denial, we’ll sit down, draft your decision, send it to me for review, and I will review it and let you know. A lot of times, you can go into a case thinking, yeah, this is a denial, and then you sit down and you can’t put that denial into articulated into words I’ve had lots of cases where i as an officer were like i think this is going to be a denial i sit down try to draft one read through it and say yeah that’s not that’s not going to fly um and I’ll and I’ll say okay well i guess it’s an approval if it’s or or maybe i need more information and I’ll issue an RFE to get further information so first yeah the first question would be do i mean “have we given the applicant a chance to deal with the negative information that we have”? “Have we identified the issue to them in the interview, given them a chance to rebut it or provide further evidence?” If we have and they’ve submitted stuff, okay, this is what we’ve got. Go ahead and is it approvable or deniable? And then work it out from there. And then, you know, send it for supervisor review. In Detroit, we used to have a senior review where on the I-form decisions, our senior officers were all former attorneys or actually were, you know, attorneys themselves as well as officers. And they were up on all of the BIA decisions and the, you know, the legal requirements for various things. And so they would review it. Now it’s kind of moved to where the seniors are a little more preoccupied currently with denaturalization tasks and other things like that. So it’s kind of moved back to supervisors to do these reviews. N-Four Hundreds had always stayed with supervisors, but the I-Forms were generally going through the seniors. And then if the supervisor or the senior thinks this is going to raise, then we might go talk to official counsel and say, okay, this is what we’ve got. What do you think? And get their opinion, get their feedback. And then if necessary in certain high profile cases, it might be okay, boss, I’m going to go issue this denial. Just want to make sure you’re good with it. And then, and then they’ll have an input on it as well. So, and then all of that takes place. 

Jennifer Behm: Yeah. There’s at least two people, if not more looking at that. 

Douglas Pierce: Yeah. It’s very, very rare that a denial of a benefit is going to be issued without being reviewed by somebody higher than the officer themselves.

Jennifer Behm: And are you able, Doug, to speak a little bit? I know you retired, but was AI starting to be a part of your regular adjudication process when you were reviewing benefits?

Douglas Pierce: At the field office level, no. I heard that they were starting to use it maybe at various law enforcement centers. Service centers within the agency were using AI to maybe ingest evidence and kind of do a quick evaluation of it. Officers did have the ability to go onto Google and ask a question and see what you got back. But AI had not been used. anything as of the time that I was done in May of last year. It may have changed. I don’t think it has changed significantly, not at the field office level anyway.

Jennifer Behm: Good information, good insight. One big thing that our practice is sort of buzzing about, and I know you weren’t necessarily heavy on the employment-based side of benefits, but I’m sure you heard about the September 2025 proclamation requiring a $100,000 payment for H-1B petitions involving conflict processing abroad. So that’s been a little bit of a ping pong. And on Friday, July 24, a circuit court denied the government’s motion to keep a stay in place that had struck down the $100K full fee. So that fee is vacated right now while the merits of the appeal go forward. I’m curious, and this may translate into a different topic that covered your time while you were there, but USCIS hasn’t issued a clean directive as far as we’re aware on adjudicating H-1B petitions that don’t include proof of payment on the one hundred thousand dollar fee. In fact, our office got an RFE requiring that. Now we’re going to show, hey, this court case struck it down. But practically speaking, I’m curious to know what processes or communication threads are in place for field offices to get these directives that all of a sudden pull a 180 change on a certain like adjudication factor. Do you think it moves quickly? Do you think it’s always office by office? If you could give us some background insight as to that, that would be good to know.

Douglas Pierce: Sure. So internally, the agency is pretty good at conveying through the office email systems and through the, you know, they have websites that are USCIS only, basically, that are accessed internally. Okay, so an intranet of sorts. An intranet of sorts that they’re pretty good at putting out, you know, hey, this is a new ruling. This is what you need to do for now. Now, I’ve heard from current employees that it’s a little more hit and miss on when they put out actual guidance about that. Sometimes there’s just radio silence like there was after the May Memorial Day Adjustment of Status memo, there was pretty much radio silence for a while. And then On a recent one where there was a stay or that was vacated, I think it was in July, that they put out some guidance maybe a week or two later internally saying, okay, yes, we’re going to follow these court rulings. Generally, they’re pretty good about paying attention to that. Now, they might not put out a public thing, but I have seen some USCIS announcements that they’ll follow the orders of these judges until appeals go, you know, until this further court action takes place.

Jennifer Behm: Well, and this feels like it is unprecedented times for so much action and headlines with respect to all things immigration. I mean, Trump 1.0 was heavy, but This is just pow, pow, pow over and over again, right? There’s a lot happening, and it is a lot to keep up with. And things move so quickly. TPS is a good example of that. And public pages for USCIS on TPS, it’s not the easiest to navigate, and nor is it always timely updated. So that’s why I was wondering internally what that process looks like. 

Douglas Pierce: Yeah, internally. Pretty good generally, but. 

Jennifer Behm: Yeah, good. I mean, that’s very, I’m happy to hear that. That’s great. And internet that everybody has access to. So with that, let’s wrap it up. But a more of a fun question. If you, Doug, were supervising a field office today, Trump 2.0, what is the one thing you’d want practitioners submitting immigration filings to know about how decisions are actually being made right now?

Douglas Pierce: Sure. So I would want practitioners to know that with more emphasis being placed on officer discretion, that they should do everything they could to make sure that the information that they submit is tied to a coherent narrative that establishes eligibility for the benefit, make it as easy as possible for the officer to understand where… why you feel this person is eligible for the benefit, and what the evidence is to support that. And tie it all in with your submissions, and don’t just… Don’t just take, here’s your marriage certificate, here’s the taxes, and ask the officer to feel that this is a bona fide marriage based on all this slew of evidence. Build the case like you want the officer to, with the decision that you want to be made, make the case in a coherent, cogent way, tying the evidence you submit with the narrative. And so make all of that as easy as possible because with the requirements that more discretion is falling upon the officers, give them the information that they need to make the decision that you want to be made. 

Jennifer Behm: I’m always telling my lawyers to bring it down a notch. There’s a craft in writing where sometimes lawyers come out of law school and we want to use these big complex words and very complex like elitist sort of writing and I’m always telling them “know your audience”. Not every adjudicator is a lawyer with a law degree um you don’t have to come at them with such like legally legal jargon make it relatable tie the regs in and that’s almost more difficult sometimes for lawyers to advocate and write for their audience rather than just writing the way they learned in law school with these

Douglas Pierce: Yeah, so it’s important to remember that, you know, applications and petitions before USCIS are not adversarial encounters. You know, it’s not a courtroom and you’re not trying to impress the opposing counsel and the judge with your facility with those legal terms. You’re talking to a person who has adjudicative authority, but who is still generally not a lawyer. And they are going to just, they’re just looking at, does this person meet the eligibility requirements or not? And so build that case as easily and easily to understand as possible, rather than, you know, trying to blow them away with legal jargon and arguments from case this and case that. pulling some obscure reference. 

Jennifer Behm: Yeah, no, it’s so true on a related note. I just got an email this morning from a client. So we’re based in Buffalo, New York. We’re right on the border of us and Canada, one of the busiest ports of entry. And so we represent by just geographic default. We work with a lot of Canadians and Canadians don’t necessarily need to file for their L-1 or TN immigration benefits with USCIS. So we prepare packages for them to bring to CBP officers at the border. Now we know CBP, they don’t want to be adjudicating immigration benefits. They’re enforcing who’s coming in, but they have to by law. And so every time we bring on new attorneys, they’re always a little bit surprised at our approach to border cases. And we, we kind of have our tried and true method of make this easy for the officer to understand what are they dealing with? What are we asking for? Why is this approvable? Bing, Bing, Bing bullet point, your argument, keep it short, sweet, simple. And our client sent an email this morning saying he was approved and that the officer was very complimentary of how we prepared the case, and made it easy for them to follow. And I think that when you’re representing clients, understanding that dynamic is really important. And sometimes clients expect like super complex writing in their immigration filings because they might be paying a lawyer a lot of money, but that’s not always in their best interest. So great feedback. And obviously, it’s relatable in the USCIS. 

Douglas Pierce: Yeah, knowing when to bring out the legal tools and when to bring out the real talk and make it presentable to a person who’s not an attorney or a judge. That’s right. Super important.

Jennifer Behm: Super important. Well, Doug, thank you so much for your time today. This was a really fun conversation. Great insight to our audience. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you took some good takeaways from today. Doug is a wealth of knowledge and keep following Berardi Immigration Law for additional webinars. And Doug, we hope you’ll come back again to chat with us. 

Douglas Pierce: Absolutely. Thanks, Jen. I had a good time. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it in the future as well. 

Jennifer Behm: Great. Have a good week, Doug. Thank you, everyone.

Douglas Pierce: Take care.