The new “inventory management” announcement formalized what has been happening for years. Here is what it actually says — and what it does not.
By Matthew Gordon, Esq.
E3 Legal Advisors PLLC
March 31, 2026
A client texted me last week in a mild panic. He had read an article that he thought fundamentally changed the way USCIS would process an I-526E petition, disallowing filing until the project I-956F was approved.
Fortunately for him and other similarly situated investors (or those contemplating investments in projects prior to I-956F approval) the rules did not change, but recent articles on the topic of USCIS petition inventory management have created a lot of confusion. So let me try to straighten this out.
What USCIS Actually Announced
On February 25, 2026, USCIS added a single new Q&A entry to its EB-5 Questions and Answers page under the heading “Inventory Management.” The substance of it is that effective March 30, 2026 — which is today — USCIS will “generally assign” I-526 and I-526E petitions under a modified FIFO (first in, first out) approach with three layers of priority:
First, I-526E petitions will be assigned for adjudicator review only after USCIS has made a decision on the associated I-956F — the project application filed by the Regional Center. Note: USCIS’s “assigning an adjudicator” means that the petition, filed prior to the associated project’s I-956F approval, is fine. It’s just waiting for the processing assignment. Second, rural I-526E petitions get priority in the FIFO queue. Third, everything else lines up after rural, and USCIS may further subdivide non-rural petitions into sub-queues by visa category (high unemployment, infrastructure, unreserved) to facilitate the use of reserved visas.
That is the entirety of the announcement. It is one Q&A entry on a USCIS webpage.
Why This Is Not New
Here is what matters: this has been how USCIS actually operates for years. As multiple attorneys stated, USCIS has “rarely” approved an I-526E before the underlying I-956F was approved. This is not new behavior. It is existing behavior that USCIS has now written down.
Why does this distinction matter? Because the difference between a new policy and a formal articulation of existing practice is the difference between “I need to change my strategy” and “the strategy I was already following is now officially confirmed.”
The Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 explicitly required that the I-956F project application exist as a predicate to the I-526E. Congress designed the system so that project-level review would happen before or concurrent with investor-level review. USCIS was already doing this. Now it has said so publicly, in a way that gives the Immigrant Investor Program Office a documented rationale for how it sequences cases — which, as Suzanne Lazicki of Lucid Professional Writing has observed, also gives USCIS a defense against mandamus lawsuits alleging unreasonable delay.
What Investors Should Actually Take Away
Let me be direct about the practical implications.
If you already filed an I-526E and your project’s I-956F is still pending: Your petition is not in trouble. It is in the queue. It will be assigned for adjudication after the I-956F is decided. This is exactly what would have happened before February 25. Nothing has changed for you.
If you are evaluating projects and have not yet filed: The I-956F approval status of a project should already have been part of your diligence. If it was not, your advisor was not doing their job. A project with an approved I-956F will see its associated investor petitions assigned to adjudicators sooner than a project with a pending I-956F. This has been true in practice; it is now true on paper. But this does not mean you should refuse to invest in a project with a pending I-956F. Many excellent projects sell out before they receive I-956F approval. The question is whether the project is well-structured, well-documented, and filed its I-956F in a timely manner — not whether USCIS has already stamped it.
If you are in a rural project: You already had priority processing under the RIA. This announcement confirms it. Rural petitions go to the front of the line.
If you are in an HUA or infrastructure project: This is the one area where the announcement carries a genuine note of concern. The announcement says USCIS will focus on rural petitions first and move to other categories “after the Form I-526E rural queue is empty or when we determine we have made decisions on enough petitions from that queue.” That language — “when we determine we have made decisions on enough” — is deliberately vague. How USCIS exercises that discretion will matter enormously to HUA and infrastructure investors. We do not know yet. Watch this space. Another twist to the plot analysis is that if Rural TEAs retrogress for India/China petitioners prior to High Unemployment, it may open up slots for High Unemployment TEA project investors more quickly. USCIS will know when this is coming and may start diverting resources to High Unemployment petitions in advance as there would be little point to starting work on Rural petitions if they will just get jammed up in a retrogression.
The Real Risk Is Not the Announcement — It Is the Clock
As I have written about previously, the far more consequential issue for investors right now is not how USCIS sequences its adjudication queue. It is the September 30, 2026 grandfathering deadline. Petitions filed on or before that date are protected if the Regional Center program lapses when its authorization expires in September 2027. Petitions filed after are not.
The grandfathering deadline does not care whether your I-956F is approved. It does not care whether your petition has been assigned to an adjudicator. It cares about one thing: whether your I-526E was filed. Period. Right now, all filed petitions have zero ‘program lapse risk’. After September 30, the risk is greater than zero.
The Takeaway
The USCIS inventory management announcement formalized existing practice. It did not create new risk for investors who have already filed. It confirmed that I-956F approval status and rural designation are the primary drivers of processing speed — which practitioners already knew. And it left open a genuinely ambiguous question about how quickly USCIS will get to HUA and infrastructure petitions after the rural queue, which is worth monitoring.
What it did not do is change the calculus for new investors. File before September 30. Choose your project carefully. Make sure the project has filed its I-956F. And do not mistake the codification of existing practice for a reason to delay.
© 2026 Matthew Gordon, E3 Legal Advisors PLLC. This blog post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.