Before the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA) every EB-5 Investor had to file an I-526 Petition whether they were a direct project investor (“Standalone Investor”) or an investor of a Regional Center project. Essential elements of the I-526 Petition are source of funds support documents and a very detailed description of the project. An approvable project usually had several hundred pages of support documents that was to be submitted for every Regional Center project investor. This caused a lot of duplication and overloaded the adjudication process.

Post-RIA only Direct Project EB-5 Investors must file a Form I-526, “Immigrant Petition by Standalone Investor”, with all project support documents.

However, Regional Center EB-5 Investors now file a different form, I-526E, “Immigrant Petition by Regional Center Investor”. Since project documents are previously filed by the Regional Center with an I-956F form, the USCIS adjudicator will focus solely on your biographical and origin of funds documents. Since USCIS gives all the I-526E Petitions of one project to the same adjudicator, we are starting to see that after an I-956F project application is approved, the I-526E Petitions are approved rather quickly.

Also, if your project qualifies as a Rural Project, it will be given priority processing. We are starting to see I-956F Rural Project Applications approved in 4 to 6 months and individual I-526E Petitions a few months after.