On September 15, 2022, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it had begun implementing the next phase of the premium processing expansion for certain petitioners who have a pending Form I-140 under the EB-1 and EB-2 classifications.

USCIS is now accepting premium process requests for:

• EB-1C multinational executive and manager petitions received by USCIS on or before Jan. 1, 2022; and
• EB-2 National Interest Waiver petitions received by USCIS on or before Feb. 1, 2022.

USCIS will only accept premium processing requests for pending cases based on their date of filing, as noted above. USCIS is not accepting new Form I-140 petitions in these categories with a premium processing request at this time.

USCIS has 45 days (instead of the 15 days for other categories) to adjudicate these newly included Form I-140 classifications.

This third phase is part of USCIS’s three-year premium processing expansion as explained in previous alerts. As a result, we anticipate USCIS will expand premium processing requests for more recently filed EB-1 and EB-2 petitions in the future.