Immigration attorney Charles Kuck flagged that USCIS is stepping up fraud-detection site visits to employers of H-1B and L-1 workers, starting with Houston.
mic What the Attorney Says
“The USCIS will be sending out FDNS officers. These are fraud detection national security folks. Mostly these are contractors and they’re going to businesses where H-1Bs and L’s are employed.”
These visits, run by the Fraud Detection and National Security directorate, exist to confirm that the job on the petition is the job you are actually doing. Under the H-1B rules, the employer has to make you available to speak with the officer. But the scope of what you owe them is narrow.
mic What the Attorney Says
“You have a legal obligation to answer just the questions about your job. You’re under no legal obligation to present them information about where you personally live or about your family.”
The practical prep is simple: know exactly how your petition described your role, title, and worksite, and be able to describe your day-to-day work in those terms. If your actual duties or location have drifted from what the petition says, that gap is the risk, and the fix is to amend the petition before an officer finds the mismatch. That is a compliance duty under INA 214, and letting it slide is how a lawful worker ends up explaining a discrepancy on the spot.
This is the same care that keeps an H-1B clean in other pressure points, from keeping status alive while an I-485 is pending to not working abroad so long that CBP treats admission as withdrawn, and it pairs with timing an H-1B decision before the I-94 expires.