The Department of Homeland Security proposal to eliminate the 60-day grace period for employment-based nonimmigrants has drawn one of the fastest public responses of any immigration rulemaking this year. As of September 16, 2026, the docket had collected 11,397 public comments — every one of them filed in the five days since the comment period opened on September 11.
The pace is accelerating rather than tapering. Federal data shows 10,871 of those comments were posted in the three days from September 14 through September 16 alone, and 2,590 arrived on September 16 itself. For comparison, most USCIS proposed rules attract a few hundred comments across a full 60-day window.
The rule at issue would remove the up-to-60-day discretionary grace period that lets a worker whose employment ends early stay in the United States to find a new employer, change status, or depart. It covers E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, O-1 and TN classifications, along with dependents. DHS estimates roughly 3,795 workers a year actually rely on the grace period, but acknowledges that more than 208,000 spouses and children hold status derived from these workers and would lose the same protection.
The comments themselves are overwhelmingly from individual workers rather than trade associations, and they concentrate on a practical objection: that an immediate departure requirement is not physically achievable. One commenter who has held H-1B status for nearly ten years while working for a large American financial firm wrote that having “built a significant life that cannot be winded up in a single day,” with US-born children, makes same-day departure “practically impossible.” Another argued the change would shift leverage to employers — that removing the window would “make us more dependent on the employers who can chose to deliberately exploit workers” — while also forcing distressed asset sales in immigrant-heavy housing markets.
Volume alone does not defeat a rule. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, DHS must consider and respond to significant comments, but it is not bound by a headcount, and duplicate or form submissions carry little independent weight. What a record like this does create is litigation exposure: a final rule that fails to engage seriously with substantive objections on the record is more vulnerable to an arbitrary-and-capricious challenge — the same theory that produced a nationwide injunction against the Duration of Status rule on September 14.
Nothing changes yet. The current 60-day grace period remains in effect throughout the rulemaking, and the comment period runs through November 10, 2026. Workers in the affected categories can file comments directly on the docket (USCIS-2026-0364), and comments describing specific, concrete harm tend to carry more weight in the record than petitions or identical form letters.
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Source: Reddit r/USCIS