Comment Submitted by Santosh Kumar

Docket No. USCIS-2026-0067 RIN 1615-AC98 Re: Clarification of Discretionary Employment Authorization for Certain Aliens, 91 FR 34352 To Whom It May Concern: I am writing to oppose this proposed rule. I am the spouse of an H-1B worker and I hold an H-4 employment authorization document. This rule would directly affect my ability to work lawfully in the United States, and I do not believe the Department has justified the changes it proposes. My central concern is that the rule takes categories of work authorization that have always functioned as eligibility based and predictable, and rewrites the general provisions at 8 CFR 274a.12(c) and 274a.13 so that a single arrest becomes a basis to deny the work permit. Under the rule as written, an applicant who has merely been arrested for, charged with, or indicted for any criminal act is presumed not to warrant a favorable exercise of discretion, and that presumption applies even where the charge was dropped, dismissed, resolved through a diversion program, or later sealed or expunged. Treating an arrest that led to no conviction as the deciding factor is fundamentally unfair. In our legal system an arrest is not proof of wrongdoing, and a dismissal or expungement is supposed to mean the matter is closed. This rule would turn a closed, favorable outcome into a permanent mark against a person’s ability to earn a living. This is a sharp and unexplained departure from how these cases are handled today. Right now, when an applicant has an old arrest with no conviction, the agency asks for the court records, the final disposition, and evidence of the person’s positive equities, and it weighs everything together. Applicants with clean dispositions and strong records are routinely approved under that individualized balancing. The proposed rule would replace that balancing with a near automatic presumption of denial, and the only way the rule allows an applicant to overcome it is by showing a significant countervailing public interest, which the Department describes almost entirely as assisting law enforcement. Ordinary students, spouses, and green card applicants have no realistic way to make that showing. In effect, the rule strips away the very factors, family, work history, tax compliance, community ties, and a favorable case outcome, that currently allow these applications to be approved. The Department does not acknowledge that it is reversing its own working practice, and it does not explain why that reversal is justified. A change of this magnitude, made without a reasoned explanation and without accounting for the reliance interests of people who are lawfully working today, is arbitrary.