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International USCIS Offices Not Accepting I-407 Green Card Surrender

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing International USCIS Offices and what are called I-407 Green Card Surrenders. 

An I-407 Surrender occurs when a person that has lawful permanent residence in the United States wishes to abandon that residence. This happens for various reasons. People move away from the US; sometimes there are tax concerns with respect to an abandonment of residence; sometimes people's lifestyle just changes. They are just not going to live in the US anymore. It does happen. In the past, local USCIS offices abroad, so field offices that were outside of the United States, could accept Green Card Surrender filings for a green card surrender but a recent announcement from USCIS titled: USCIS will No Longer Accept I-407 at International Field Offices. Quoting directly: "Beginning July 1, USCIS will no longer accept form I-407 record of abandonment of lawful permanent resident status at International Field Offices by mail or in person. Individuals who wish to voluntarily record abandonment of their lawful permanent resident status must submit form I-407 via mail to USCIS Eastern Foreign Center. 

So the thing to take away from this video is, we have discussed this in the past. USCIS is closing down their International Offices. We are slowly seeing the functions of those offices being truncated in the lead-up to them closing down entirely. Most notably, in another video on this channel we talked about Manila and certain posts in Mexico which were no longer accepting certain types of filings. Now we are seeing the 407s are being truncated effective July 1.

How this will play out long-term I think it is pretty clear to see, it is no longer going to be possible to go ahead and file for green card surrender with a local USCIS office abroad because after March 2020, presumably, there will be no USCIS offices located abroad to file these surrenders with.