In a rule DHS wrote to explain its own new policy, the agency describes a company officer who signed one blank sheet of paper, then told a subordinate to scan that signature and paste it onto more than twenty Form I-129 petitions. In a separate case, a consulting firm ran roughly 3,000 Form I-140 petitions through the same shortcut — one signature, copied three thousand times.
Neither company thought they were doing anything unusual. Signature pages get reused all the time, especially at companies filing dozens of petitions a season. But USCIS has been counting. Denials tied to invalid signatures climbed from 300 in fiscal year 2021 to 2,953 in fiscal year 2025 — a tenfold jump in four years. The agency's Administrative Appeals Office has already ruled on 758 separate appeals over copied signatures alone.
Starting July 10, 2026, the cost of that shortcut changes. DHS published an interim final rule on May 11, 2026 (91 Fed. Reg. 25479), amending 8 C.F.R. § 103.2(a)(7)(ii)(A). Before this rule, an invalid signature discovered after a petition was already receipted led to inconsistent outcomes — sometimes a rejection with the fee refunded, sometimes a denial with the fee kept, depending on which officer picked up the file. The new rule ends the guesswork by explicitly giving USCIS adjudicators the discretion to deny, not just reject, any benefit request found to carry an invalid signature — and to keep the filing fee when they do.
There is no way to fix it after the fact. USCIS considered, and rejected, letting petitioners swap in a corrected signature on a pending case. Its reasoning: doing so would let a defective filing hold its place in line — its cap slot, its priority date — ahead of petitions that were signed correctly the first time.
What Actually Counts as Invalid
The definitions of a valid signature haven't changed. What's changed is what happens when USCIS catches an invalid one. A signature is invalid if it's a scanned or photocopied image pasted onto a different form than the one it was originally signed on — even when the underlying signature is genuinely the signer's own. It's invalid if it's a rubber stamp, even one the signer personally authorized for their own use. It's invalid if it belongs to the wrong person: an attorney, paralegal, or preparer signing where the petitioner should have signed. Attorneys sign Form G-28. Petitioners sign the petition. And it's invalid if it comes from signature software — DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and similar tools are not accepted on paper-filed or PDF-uploaded forms, though USCIS's own guided e-filing system on myUSCIS is a separate, permitted channel.
