United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued today an Interim Final Rule (IFR) that seeks to clarify the agency’s procedures for denying or rejecting a petition or application for an immigration benefit on the basis that it does not contain a valid signature. The IFR will become effective sixty days from May 11, 2026, and USCIS will accept comments on it during this sixty-day period.
The IFR has been published to address the issue of “questionable and invalid signatures on USCIS immigration benefit requests” and to ensure a “consistent implementation of policy addressing invalid signatures” by allowing USCIS officers to exercise discretion to reject or deny “improperly signed requests.”
Current Signature Requirements
A “valid signature” on a petition or application for an immigration benefit is “any handwritten mark or sign made by a requestor … to signify his or her knowledge and approval of the contents of the request and any supporting document(s) and that the information contained therein is true and correct.” This applies to any request filed by mail or online through the PDF upload process. In very limited situations, USCIS considers an electronic signature to be a valid signature. These situations include online e-filing through MyUSCIS, where a requestor’s valid signature consists of a secure electronic signature prompted during the e-filing process. Additionally, during certain PDF upload processes, if no handwritten mark or signature is detected on the uploaded form, a secure electronic signature may be provided when prompted.
Leaving aside these limited situations, the IFR states that an electronic signature is not valid and only a requestor’s handwritten signature is valid. The IFR makes it clear, however, that USCIS will not generally require submission of the “original” document with a wet-ink signature and that a “scanned, copied, or faxed version of the originally signed benefit request, with the wet-ink signature on it” will be accepted.
Invalid Signatures
The comments to the IFR provide a number of examples of invalid signatures:
- Signatures created by copy-pasting or affixing an image of the same signature on multiple benefit requests;
- Signatures that are stamped;
- Signatures created by signature software programs
The comments to the IFR specifically note that photocopied, faxed, or scanned signatures will be accepted only if the photocopy, fax, or scan is of the original document containing the handwritten wet-ink signature.
The IFR provides that, If USCIS accepts a benefit request and determines later that the request was not submitted with a valid signature, USCIS has discretion to reject or deny the request. If a rejection occurs, the filing will be returned without a filing date, and the relevant fee returned. If a denial occurs, USCIS will not return the filing fee. A rejection or denial may occur some time after a filing appears to have been accepted by USCIS.
Any person filing a petition or application for an immigration benefit with USCIS should ensure that it contains a “valid signature”, per the requirements noted in the IFR. This means that either an original wet signature must be provided or a scan or photocopy of an original wet signature placed on the petition or application being submitted must be provided. A scan or a photocopy of a signature that was placed on a different or blank document will not be valid. Stamped signatures and e-signatures, including Docusign signatures, will also not be valid.
The IFR does not create new signature requirements for petitions and applications filed with USCIS; it simply codifies existing requirements and gives USCIS officers authority to deny or reject such filings. Although the IFR will not go into effect until sixty days from May 11th, all petitions and applications filed with USCIS should comply with the agency’s valid signature requirements with immediate effect.
