U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today announced an extension of the flexibilities in rules related to Form I-9 compliance that was granted earlier this year.

Starting December 1, applicants for U.S. citizenship will have to correctly answer at least 12 of 20 questions posed by immigration officials. The current civics test requires immigrants to correctly answer 6 questions out of a total of 10.

The civics test is one several required steps immigrants need to fulfill before becoming naturalized U.S. citizens — a process administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Most applicants also undergo another test to demonstrate their ability to read, write and speak basic English.

After the 2008 recession, immigrants were twice as likely as native-born Americans to start businesses, according to New American Economy. Today, more than 3 million immigrant entrepreneurs live in the United States.

Congress will allow the agency to raise the fee for premium processing and expand it to cover new immigration categories. The measure is part of H.R. 8337, an appropriations bill to fund the federal government that passed the House and Senate at the end of September 2020 and was signed into law by the president.

A federal judge in California ruled in favor of immigration groups, including the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, who challenged a new rule that would have increased by 81% the cost to apply to become a U.S. citizen.

“With this administration doing extreme action on immigration, certainly that’s created an ample pipeline of cases that could potentially come to the Supreme Court for resolution,” said Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF.

If you are Sephardic or you are a direct descendant of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula or forced to convert into Christianity, you may apply for Portuguese citizenship.

According to the Portuguese Decree Law No. 30-A / 2015 of February 27th, that modifies the Regulations on Portuguese Nationality, the designation of “Sephardic Jews” refers to the descendants of the ancient Jews and traditional Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Sefarad or Hispania), that is, Portugal and Spain. The Law does not make differences between Jews from the Spanish or the Portuguese kingdoms.

A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration acted within its authority in terminating legal protections that have allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants to live and work legally in the United States, sometimes for decades, after fleeing conflict or natural disasters in their home countries.