DHS Proposes New EB-5 Rules to Implement the Reform and Integrity Act

What DHS just proposed

On July 2, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security published a 358-page Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would, for the first time, write formal regulations implementing the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act (RIA) of 2022. The RIA has governed the program by statute for four years — USCIS has been applying it through policy guidance and informal adjudication practice in the absence of implementing regulations. The NPRM is DHS’s attempt to close that gap: investor eligibility, regional center compliance obligations, targeted employment area (TEA) determinations, priority date retention, audit and enforcement authority, and automatic revocation provisions are all addressed in the proposed text.

Nothing in the NPRM is effective yet. It is a proposal, not a rule. The public comment period runs 60 days from publication and closes August 31, 2026. Only after DHS reviews comments and publishes a final rule — a process that historically takes months to years — will any of these provisions bind investors or regional centers. For now, the program continues to operate exactly as it has under the RIA statute and existing USCIS policy guidance.

Why a proposed rule four years after the statute

Congress passed the RIA in March 2022 and left the details of implementation to DHS. The statute set the framework — set-aside categories, minimum investment amounts, integrity measures — but the mechanics of applying it, how TEA status gets certified, what documentation an audit requires, when capital counts as genuinely at risk, were left to agency rulemaking that never happened. USCIS filled the gap with policy guidance, and the program has run for four years on that improvised foundation. The NPRM is DHS converting four years of informal practice into a formal regulatory structure that is harder to challenge and easier to enforce.

What the proposed rule actually changes

Three parts of the NPRM matter most for investors currently in the pipeline or considering a filing:

• TEA determinations move fully to USCIS. The RIA already shifted TEA authority away from state agencies. The NPRM writes the procedural mechanics of that shift into regulation, codifying how USCIS certifies rural and high-unemployment designations rather than relying on state-issued letters. For investors targeting a rural or high-unemployment set-aside category, this changes who reviews the underlying data, not the categories themselves.
• Qualifying capital gets narrower. The proposed rule would restrict the use of repaid bridge financing — capital a project borrowed and repaid before EB-5 funds arrived — in structuring what counts as an investor’s qualifying capital. Projects and fund administrators that lean on bridge-financing structures will need to rework how they document the capital stack.
• Audit and enforcement authority is formalized. DHS proposes explicit audit authority over regional centers and new-commercial-enterprise structures, along with automatic revocation provisions for noncompliance. This is the RIA’s integrity mandate acquiring teeth: regional centers that have operated informally under the 2022 statute face a more codified, and more exposed, compliance posture.

What does not change

The proposed rule does not touch the minimum investment amounts set by the RIA: $800,000 for TEA projects, $1,050,000 for non-TEA projects. It does not change the set-aside category structure — 20% rural, 10% high-unemployment, 2% infrastructure. And critically, it does not touch the September 30, 2026 grandfathering deadline covered in our EB-5 Regional Center analysis: that protection is written into the RIA statute itself, not into any regulation this rulemaking can amend.

Why this raises the stakes on the September 2026 deadline, rather than lowering them

An investor weighing whether to file before September 30, 2026 might read a 358-page proposed rule and conclude the ground is still shifting, so waiting for clarity is the safer move. The opposite is closer to true. The NPRM’s comment period closes August 31, 2026, one month before the grandfathering deadline. A final rule, even if DHS moves quickly, would not plausibly issue before the grandfathering window closes. Realistically, final regulations land sometime in 2027, closer to the RIA’s own September 2027 program sunset. Investors who file I-526E petitions before September 30, 2026 are protected against whatever the final rule eventually says, adjudicated under the standards in place when they filed. Investors who wait for the final rule to settle are choosing to file, if at all, under regulations that don’t yet exist, after the one deadline that offers unconditional protection has already passed.

The capital-structure change is the clearest example. An investor whose target project relies on a bridge-financing structure that the NPRM would restrict has a direct incentive to file before any final rule takes effect, while the current, more permissive practice still governs. Waiting does not avoid the new rule. It risks filing directly into it.

Where this leaves the September 30, 2026 planning window

Our earlier analysis of the EB-5 grandfathering deadline laid out why September 30, 2026, not the September 2027 program sunset, is the date that actually matters for investor planning. The NPRM does not change that conclusion. It reinforces it. A rulemaking that formalizes four years of accumulated statutory requirements is one more reason to lock in a filing under the framework in place today, rather than wait for a regulatory landscape that will not be settled for months, and quite possibly years.