USCIS Ends Automatic Deportation Protection for ~200,000 Immigrant Juveniles — SIJ Deferred Action Policy Change Takes Effect May 10

A USCIS policy change effective May 10, 2026 eliminates automatic deferred action for Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) petitioners who have been approved but cannot yet obtain green cards due to the EB-4 visa backlog. The policy, set out in USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0198 issued April 10, 2026, reverses a 2022 administrative practice that automatically granted temporary deportation protection and work authorization to approximately 200,000 children who received SIJ status — a classification reserved for children who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned and who had their cases adjudicated by state courts — but remain in the EB-4 visa backlog, sometimes for years, due to country-of-birth limits. Under the prior framework, USCIS automatically evaluated these children for deferred action when their SIJ petition was approved, providing de facto deportation protection while they waited. Beginning today, USCIS will no longer make this automatic determination; those seeking deportation protection must affirmatively request it, and the administration has indicated requests will be evaluated individually with no presumption in favor of grant. The National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild (NIPNLG) had won a court stay of an earlier June 2025 attempt to eliminate this policy from the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York (A.C.R. v. Noem); USCIS issued PM-602-0198 on April 10, 2026, designed to moot that stay by reframing the policy termination. Immigration lawyers nationwide scrambled to file last-minute SIJ petitions before the May 8 cutoff (May 10 falls on a Sunday, making Friday, May 8 the effective deadline for petitions to arrive at USCIS under the prior favorable framework). The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) described the policy as stripping deportation protection from 'some of the most vulnerable children in the immigration system' — children who have already been adjudicated victims of abuse or abandonment by state courts and who may have lived in the U.S. for years. Under the Trump second term's enforcement priorities, SIJ-approved children who lose deferred action are potentially subject to removal to countries where they may face the same or similar conditions of danger from which they fled.