USCIS Can Now Push Affirmative Asylum Cases Into Immigration Court Without an Interview: The July 28 Rule and the 2026 Immigration Firm Workflow Rebuild

A DHS interim final rule effective July 28, 2026 lets USCIS refer certain affirmative asylum applications to immigration court without conducting an interview first. For immigration firms, that collapses a predictable multi-year timeline into an unpredictable one — and it breaks the fee, retainer, and trust-accounting assumptions most asylum practices were built on. Here is what changes operationally and how to re-engineer intake, scoping, and billing around it.