USCIS Rule Lets Agency Force Green Card, Citizenship and Asylum Filings Online

The federal government took a step toward eliminating paper immigration applications. The Department of Homeland Security published an interim final rule in the Federal Register on Monday that lets U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services require electronic filing for a wide range of immigration benefits, according to USCIS and reporting from the Economic Times.

This covers green card applications and renewals, family-based petitions, citizenship requests, asylum claims, employment authorization filings and Temporary Protected Status paperwork. Basically the core of the immigration system.

USCIS can only mandate e-filing for a form once that form has been available for electronic submission for at least 180 days. Before flipping any form to online-only, the agency has to post at least 60 days notice on its website, according to both USCIS and the law firm Erickson Immigration Group. Nothing becomes mandatory overnight.

Applicants will submit through a USCIS online account, either filling out the form directly or uploading a PDF with supporting evidence, per USCIS's own guidance. The rule took effect August 11, 2026, and DHS will take public comments through October 13, 2026, according to Envoy Global.

The Money Case

DHS is clear on why it's doing this. In fiscal year 2025, USCIS processed more than 14 million benefit requests. Its lockbox facilities, run through the Treasury Department, handled roughly 453 million pages of paper submissions, according to the Economic Times and the New Indian Express.

Running that paper pipeline cost the government about 396 million dollars in lockbox operating expenses plus more than 10 million dollars in postage alone. That's taxpayer money spent shipping, scanning and manually entering paperwork that could be typed into a form once and stored digitally.

DHS says mandatory e-filing will cut manual handling, data entry, shipping, storage and scanning costs while speeding up how fast cases get decided. That's a straightforward, defensible argument for anyone who thinks government should stop wasting money on 1990s-era processes in 2026.

Who Gets Left Behind

There is a fair concern. Not everyone has reliable internet access, a scanner, or comfort navigating a government web portal, especially older applicants, rural filers, or people without steady tech access. Forcing a 75-year-old green card renewal applicant in a remote area onto a mandatory online system without a real safety valve would be a legitimate problem.

DHS addressed this by creating a waiver process. Anyone who says online filing would cause them undue hardship can file Form I-936 and request an exemption, reviewed by USCIS case by case, according to Erickson Immigration Group. The catch: that waiver costs 25 dollars, and USCIS has said that simply not being familiar with online systems generally won't qualify on its own, per Erickson Immigration Group's summary of the rule.

That's a real tension worth watching. The waiver exists, which is more than a blanket mandate with no exit. But a 25 dollar fee and a 'you should have learned the internet' standard could still box out people who genuinely can't comply, particularly elderly applicants or those in low-connectivity areas. No source in this rollout indicates DHS has published clearer criteria for what actually counts as undue hardship beyond that general statement.

Adoption So Far Is Uneven

USCIS already offers electronic filing for numerous forms, including I-90 (replace a green card), I-130 (family sponsorship), I-485 (adjustment of status), I-751 (removing conditions on residency), I-765 (work authorization), I-589 (asylum) and N-400 (naturalization), according to Newsweek. As of December 2025, USCIS offered online filing for 22 forms total.

But voluntary uptake has been lopsided. About 43 percent of individual applicants chose to file online in fiscal year 2025 when given the option, according to Newsweek, citing USCIS figures. Fewer than 6 percent of attorneys and accredited representatives did the same. That gap suggests immigration lawyers, who handle a huge share of filings, have stuck with paper for reasons the rule doesn't fully address, whether that's client preference, liability concerns, or workflow habits built over decades.

Adam Klein, a co-founder of Globali.ai and a former senior DHS official who worked on developing USCIS's electronic forms, told Newsweek that structured digital data gives the government real advantages on accuracy, fraud detection and efficiency. That's the administration's core pitch, and it's not an unreasonable one: digital records are easier to search and cross-reference than a warehouse of paper.

What Happens Next

Nothing is mandatory yet for any specific form. USCIS still has to designate individual forms for mandatory e-filing and give the 60-day public notice before any requirement actually kicks in, according to Envoy Global and USCIS itself.

The public comment window runs through October 13, 2026. That's the window for immigration attorneys, advocacy groups, and applicants who rely on paper filing to make the case, on the record, for stronger hardship protections or slower rollout timelines before DHS locks in how broadly this gets applied.