If you have a pending Form I-485 Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status, the process you are in today looks meaningfully different from the one your colleagues navigated only a few years ago. You should now expect an in-person interview, a greater likelihood of a Request for Evidence (RFE), longer waits for approval, and depending on where you live unexpected friction even in something as ordinary as renewing your driver’s license. Running through nearly all of it is a familiar theme: USCIS continues to read requirements into the law that the statute and regulations simply do not contain, and the burden of those misreadings falls on lawfully present applicants and the employers who sponsor them..

1. Expect an Interview

Since time immemorial, employment-based green card interviews were rare. USCIS understood what practitioners understood: an adjustment interview in a well-documented employment case rarely produces anything new. Every question the officer asks has already been asked and answered on the I-485 and its supporting record. Under the prior approach, only a small share of employment-based cases by USCIS’s own past estimates, roughly five to ten percent were called in at all.

That has changed. The default rule has always lived in the regulations at 8 CFR 245.6, which provides that an adjustment applicant may be interviewed unless USCIS waives it, and the broad interview waivers of the prior administration are now largely gone. In practice, far more employment-based applicants are being scheduled for wasteful interviews than at any point in US history. In a mid-sized field office such as Houston, applicants are commonly waiting somewhere in the range of eight to fourteen months from filing to an interview notice, and cases that were filed during the waiver era are being pulled into the queue first.

Here is the reassuring part. For all the anxiety an interview notice produces, the interview itself functions primarily as an identity check, confirming that the person in the chair is the same person described in the filings. The chance of a denial following an employment-based interview is very small. USCIS does not, as a rule, spend its officers’ time and taxpayer resources calling an applicant in only to deny the case; where the agency intends to deny, it will ordinarily issue a Notice of Intent to Deny well before any interview is scheduled. If you receive an interview notice, then, it is far more often a sign that you are close to approval than a cause for alarm. Preparation still matters; your answers on dates, addresses, employment, and travel history should track your filings exactly, particularly given that a denial now carries heavier consequences under the agency’s expanded Notice to Appear policy for applicants who have fallen out of status but the interview should be approached as a final step, not a hurdle.

2. More RFEs, Often Without Real Substance

We have seen a marked increase in RFEs on adjustment cases. What is striking is how few of them identify a genuine problem with eligibility. For the most part these requests are a symptom of a slow-moving bureaucracy revisiting cases that have simply aged while sitting in the queue, and they tend to fall into two familiar categories.

The first is a request to re-submit the Form I-693 medical examination. Because adjustment cases so often sit pending for years, the medical would frequently expire before the case was ready to be approved, prompting an RFE for an updated exam. The good news is that USCIS has largely fixed this. Under guidance first issued in April 2024, a Form I-693 properly completed and signed by a civil surgeon on or after November 1, 2023, no longer expires while the application it was filed with remains pending—so the classic “your medical has expired” RFE should become far less common. A June 2025 update refined the rule, tying the medical’s validity to the specific application it accompanied, meaning a withdrawn or denied case voids the exam and a fresh one is required for any future filing. Two caveats remain: medicals signed before November 1, 2023 still carry only a two-year validity, and since December 2, 2024 the I-693 must be filed together with the I-485.

The second common RFE asks the applicant to confirm a bona fide, continuing job offer. In substance, USCIS is requesting a Form I-485 Supplement J—either from the original I-140 petitioner or from a new employer offering the same or a similar position—confirming that the underlying offer remains valid. These requests are frequently paired with a demand for the applicant’s recent pay statements, W-2s, and tax returns. While the request is not baseless in theory, it is often issued reflexively on cases where the record already establishes the ongoing offer, adding months to the timeline for no real evidentiary gain.

3. Approvals Are Taking Longer—and Litigation Is the Answer

Whether an applicant is waiting for an interview to be scheduled or waiting for a decision after one has occurred, USCIS is simply taking longer to approve cases. Some of this is ordinary backlog. But a meaningful share of the delay appears, at least to many practitioners, to be a feature rather than a bug consistent with a broader “enforcement” posture in which slowing benefits to lawful immigrants is treated as an acceptable outcome rather than a problem to be solved.

The most effective tool against unreasonable delay is litigation. When a case has been ready for adjudication and USCIS has no legitimate reason to sit on it, a mandamus action in federal court—grounded in the Administrative Procedure Act’s command that agencies decide matters within a reasonable time, 5 U.S.C. § 706(1)—compels the agency to act. Because USCIS never has a lawful basis to withhold a decision on an otherwise approvable case, these suits are resolved in the applicant’s favor with striking regularity, often prompting an approval or a decision within days of filing.

In the meantime, protecting your work and travel authorization is essential. The combined Employment Authorization Document and Advance Parole card is currently taking roughly four to six months to issue, and renewals have become more precarious: the automatic extension period for pending EAD renewals was eliminated effective October 30, 2025, and the maximum validity of certain renewed EADs was reduced to eighteen months in December 2025. The practical consequence is a real risk of a gap in work authorization if renewals are not filed early. Applicants who can maintain an underlying nonimmigrant status such as H-1B or L-1, or who hold an independent basis for work authorization, should do so as a backstop, because USCIS is not reliably responsive to expedite requests.

4. Renewing a Driver’s License Is Getting Harder

A less obvious but increasingly common problem arises at the state level. Under the federal REAL ID framework, a person generally must establish lawful presence in the United States to obtain or renew a driver’s license. Several states have begun conflating lawful presence with holding an unexpired visa. That is a category error. A visa is fundamentally a document used to seek entry into the United States; once a person has been admitted, it is the Form I-94, not the visa stamp, that determines how long the person may lawfully remain. An expired visa stamp says nothing about whether a person is lawfully present today.

This is one of many examples why the states should have nothing to do with federal immigration law.

The point matters concretely in Texas. The current DPS rule, 37 Texas Administrative Code § 15.24, expressly permits a foreign passport bearing a U.S. visa—“valid or expired”—when accompanied by an unexpired Form I-94. DPS has now proposed amending that rule to strike the words “or expired” and require the visa to remain valid, and some offices have already begun demanding an unexpired visa in practice. The proposed change would create a genuine trap for people who are lawfully maintaining status but whose visa stamps have lapsed. It also sits uneasily with DPS’s own policy manual, which lists a Form I-797 reflecting a pending I-485 among the documents that establish lawful presence. A pending adjustment application places the applicant in a period of authorized stay; it is affirmative evidence of lawful presence, not the absence of it.

If you seek to renew a Texas license on the strength of a pending I-485, expect delays while DPS runs verification through the federal SAVE program, and be prepared to escalate up to and including litigation if an office wrongly refuses to recognize your status. Our firm has submitted public comment opposing the proposed amendment to § 15.24 for precisely these reasons.

What This Means for Employers and Employees

The common thread across all four trends is that the adjustment process has grown slower and more adversarial, not because the law changed, but because the agency and certain states have taken to applying it in ways the law does not require. The response is the same one that has always served applicants well, only now it matters more. Keep your documentation complete and internally consistent, so an interviewing officer or an RFE-minded adjudicator has nothing to seize on. Maintain an independent basis for work authorization wherever possible, rather than relying solely on a pending EAD. Do not panic at an interview notice—treat it as the near-final step it almost always is. And where USCIS or a state agency oversteps, remember that the courts remain a reliable backstop. The agency’s misreadings are frustrating, but they are also, increasingly, correctable.

For more information, or for a detailed conversation about your pending I-485, an interview notice, an RFE, or a delayed adjudication, please schedule a time to speak here.

By: Ryan A. Wilck, Partner and Attorney at Law

Ryan Wilck is a Managing Partner and attorney at Reddy & Neumann, P.C. with over a decade of US immigration law experience, enthusiastic and proactive in his approach assisting clients and their employees through the various phases of the permanent residency a/k/a Green Card process. “Concilio et labore” is not only the motto of Ryan’s favorite sports club but is also his life’s motto; all things come through wisdom and effort. Ryan is passionate about gaining the trust of his clients by utilizing a relentless and detail-oriented approach to understand their specific goals and concerns, hoping to instill a sense of confidence and stability. Whatever your immigration problem or interest, he and his team will find a solution, through wisdom and effort. Reddy & Neumann, P.C. has been serving the business community for over 20 years and is Houston’s largest immigration law firm focused solely on employment-based business immigration. We work with employers and their employees, helping navigate the complex immigration process efficiently and cost-effective.

We are committed to assisting our clients with navigating or avoiding the complex PERM Labor Certification (ETA 9089 and other challenging immigration matters as an accomplished immigration law firm in Houston, Texas. Our team is here to offer the direction and support you require, whether you’re a company trying to hire top talent or a foreign worker seeking to develop a career in the United States. To find out more about how we can help you with your immigration issues, get in touch with us right away.