On May 21, 2026 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a startling memorandum (“Adjustment of Status is a Matter of Discretion and Administrative Grace, and an Extraordinary Relief that Permits Applicants to Dispense with the Ordinary Consular Visa Process”).

As the memo’s title boldly proclaims, USCIS doubles down on its contention that adjustment of status — the process whereby the great majority of noncitizens have obtained lawful permanent resident (green card) status for decades — is “extraordinary,” a matter of “administrative grace,” and “not designed to supersede the regular consular visa-issuing process.”

That rhetoric may be accurate as a description of how the agency wants officers to think, but it is much harder to square with the case law that USCIS cites and the statute Congress has actually given us.

Over the last several decades, Congress has repeatedly amended the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in ways that weave adjustment of status into the core architecture of the immigration system, especially in the employment-based context.

INA Section 245(i) fundamentally undercuts the notion that adjustment of status is “extraordinary” by design. Congress deliberately created a pathway allowing individuals who entered without inspection or violated status — precisely the categories most disfavored in discretionary frameworks — to adjust status inside the United States upon payment of a penalty fee. That is not the architecture of a narrow, exceptional remedy; it is a mass-eligibility mechanism intended to normalize in-country processing for a broad population. By overriding core admissibility barriers and preserving eligibility through grandfathering, § 245(i) reflects a legislative judgment that adjustment should operate as a pragmatic, widely available solution — not a rare or unusual indulgence.

INA Section 245(k) explicitly anticipates up to 180 days of unlawful status, unauthorized employment, or other violations after admission and says, in effect, “you can still adjust.” That is not how you treat a rare indulgence; that is how you normalize real‑world bumps in an otherwise meritorious case.

AC‑21 portability likewise assumes that I‑485s will remain pending long enough that job changes are routine and then protects those applicants when they move to same or similar employment after 180 days. Congress does not build a detailed portability regime around a marginal, disfavored benefit. It does that when the benefit is central to how the system actually functions for workers and their families.

The Child Status Protection Act goes even further by tying core “age‑freezing” protections to the filing and acceptance of an adjustment application. If adjustment were simply a peripheral bypass to “real” immigration through consulates, it would be odd for Congress to anchor such a critical safeguard to the domestic AOS filing date.

The EB-5 immigrant investor program—especially as modernized by the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act (RIA) — similarly contradicts the “extraordinary remedy” narrative by embedding adjustment of status into the program’s core functionality. Post-RIA features like visa set-asides and concurrent filing assume that investors already in the United States will routinely pursue adjustment, leveraging work and travel authorization while their petitions are adjudicated. This is not incidental; it is central to how the program attracts and retains capital. Treating AOS as exceptional in this context misaligns with Congress’s economic design, which depends on predictability and accessibility of in-country processing as a standard, not extraordinary, pathway for qualified investors.

And INA Section 245(c)’s “no fault” and “technical reasons” carve‑outs confirm that not every deviation from perfect status maintenance is meant to be treated as a heavy adverse factor that must be offset by “unusual or even outstanding equities.”

None of this denies that adjustment of status is discretionary. But taken together, these provisions make it increasingly difficult to sustain the claim — repeated in today’s memo –that adjustment is, in 2026, best understood as extraordinary relief that must be kept in a subordinate place behind consular processing.

If USCIS wants to lean on that narrative, it needs to grapple openly with how 245(i), 245(k), AC‑21, CSPA, the RIA, and 245(c) have transformed adjustment from a narrow act of grace into an integral, congressionally‑structured pathway.