{"id":15583,"date":"2025-12-10T09:18:03","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T15:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/?p=15583"},"modified":"2025-12-10T09:18:03","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T15:18:03","slug":"uscis-guidance-on-discretionary-factors-and-social-media-vetting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/2025\/12\/10\/uscis-guidance-on-discretionary-factors-and-social-media-vetting\/","title":{"rendered":"USCIS Guidance on Discretionary Factors and Social Media Vetting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On August 19, 2025, USCIS <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uscis.gov\/newsroom\/news-releases\/uscis-to-consider-anti-americanism-in-immigrant-benefit-requests\" data-name=\"announced \" data-type=\"url\">announced<\/a> policy manual updates on how officers apply discretionary factors in benefit requests. The changes address compliance with immigration laws, past parole requests, national security concerns, and expand social media vetting. This applies to pending and new cases. For more information, please refer to <a href=\"https:\/\/ogletree.com\/insights-resources\/blog-posts\/uscis-updates-policy-manual-new-discretionary-factors-focusing-on-anti-american-activity\/\">this summary<\/a> from Ogletree Deakins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On August 19, 2025, USCIS announced policy manual updates on how officers apply discretionary factors in benefit requests. The changes address compliance with immigration laws, past parole requests, national security concerns, and expand social media vetting. This applies to pending and new cases. For more information, please refer to this summary from Ogletree Deakins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8500,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","ACF":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15583"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/isss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}