The Biden administration has updated its policy manual to calculate the age of non-citizen children in certain situations under the Child Status Protection Act (CSPA).
The move is seen as a small but important step in addressing the issue of aged-out children, a large number of whom are Indians, who arrived in the US legally with their parents. The CSPA was enacted to protect non-citizen children from losing eligibility to obtain lawful permanent resident status based on an approved visa petition by providing a method to calculate the child's age.
The USCIS has officially made one of the long-requested policy changes, to use the Dates for Filing chart to determine CSPA age. Under the previous CSPA guidance, USCIS considered a visa available for purposes of the CSPA age calculation based only on the Final Action Date chart.
This policy change is effective immediately and applies to pending applications. Between October and December 2020, certain non-citizens were permitted to file their adjustment of status applications under the Dates for Filing chart of the Visa Bulletin. However, the Final Action Date chart never advanced sufficiently for their applications to be approved.
These non-citizens filed their adjustment of status applications with the requisite fee without knowing whether the CSPA would benefit them. If these non-citizens are eligible to adjust their status, they will be eligible to apply for employment and travel authorization based on their pending adjustment of status application, and they generally will not lose previously issued employment or travel authorization.
The USCIS said this Policy Manual update will not prevent all children from aging out before an immigrant visa is available to them, nor will it prevent children from losing non-immigrant status derived from their parents upon reaching the actual age of 21.
