For years, an incomplete immigration filing bought applicants a do-over. The update, catalogued as Policy Alert PA-2026-05, took hold immediately and reaches any case already sitting in USCIS's queue, not only filings submitted afterward. A memo effective Sept. 11, 2018, during the first Trump term, carried the same logic: stop rewarding thin filings submitted mainly to unlock a secondary benefit, such as work authorization tied to a pending case. Taken together, immigration attorneys describe a squeeze that now presses at both ends of a case: the initial filing and, later, the interview. For families juggling more than one pending case, a single denial can ripple outward — a lapsed work-permit renewal, for example, while a related green card case is still sitting in review.