Matter of Borges Borsoi: USCIS Just Restricted SIJS Age Rules

A week before her 21st birthday, Giovana Borges Borsoi walked into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Probate and Family Court and secured what she needed. The court entered a Judgment of Dependency, ruled that Ms. Borges Borsoi was an unmarried juvenile ward under state law, found that reunification with her mother was not viable because of neglect and abandonment, and concluded that returning her to Brazil, her country of nationality, was not in her best interest. Those findings are the state court predicate for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, the humanitarian federal immigration classification that Congress created in 1990 for young immigrants who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned by a parent. She had the order in hand on Friday, March 3, 2023. Her 21st birthday was the following Wednesday.

She mailed her SIJS petition on Monday, March 6, 2023. She sent two additional copies on Tuesday, March 7, 2023, presumably in case one got lost. USCIS received all three petitions on Wednesday, March 8, 2023. That was her 21st birthday.

On September 23, 2026, USCIS’s Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) designated its decision denying her petition as a "precedential ruling," binding on all USCIS adjudicators going forward. The decision, Matter of Borges Borsoi, 30 I&N Dec. 67 (AAO 2026), Interim Decision #4248, holds that a petition received by USCIS on the day of the applicant’s 21st birthday does not satisfy the regulatory requirement that the applicant be “under 21 years of age at the time of filing the petition.” The rule is now binding: SIJS petitions must be filed before the birthday, not on it. Ms. Borges Borsoi’s petition was denied. She is now subject to removal proceedings.

Matter of Borges Borsoi is the ninth precedential decision from a Department of Justice or Department of Homeland Security immigration body in about four weeks that shifts law in the government’s direction. Eight of those decisions came from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). This one comes from the AAO, which is a separate appellate body within USCIS that decides appeals from denied immigration benefit petitions. This piece explains what the decision changes, what happened to Ms. Borges Borsoi and why, and what applicants and attorneys should do now.

Understanding SIJS: What This Program Does

Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, commonly abbreviated as SIJS, is a federal humanitarian immigration classification for immigrant children in the United States who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned by a parent and who have a state juvenile court order declaring them dependent on the court or placing them under the care of a state agency or approved individual. Congress created SIJS in the Immigration Act of 1990, codified at Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) § 101(a)(27)(J), 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(27)(J). It has been amended several times since, most significantly by the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), which added protections for children whose petitions might otherwise be denied based on age.

SIJS is a pathway to lawful permanent residence, meaning a green card. An SIJS petition is filed on USCIS Form I-360. The applicant must:

• Be present in the United States.
• Have a state juvenile court order that either declares the applicant dependent on the court or places the applicant in the custody of a state agency or an individual or entity appointed by the court.
• Have specific findings from the state juvenile court that reunification with one or both parents is not viable due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, or a similar basis under state law, and that returning to the applicant’s country of nationality or last habitual residence would not be in the applicant’s best interest.
• Be under 21 years of age at the time the petition is filed with USCIS.
• Be unmarried at the time of filing and at the time USCIS decides the petition.

The age requirement is what Matter of Borges Borsoi addresses. The INA itself does not specify an age limit for SIJS. The 21-year limit comes from regulation at 8 C.F.R. § 204.11(b)(1), which USCIS adopted in 1993 and reaffirmed in a 2022 rulemaking. What Matter of Borges Borsoi clarifies, with binding force, is how to count the birthday itself.

What the AAO Decided

The AAO issued two holdings:

First, to satisfy the regulatory requirement at 8 C.F.R. § 204.11(b)(1) that an SIJS applicant be “under 21 years of age at the time of filing,” the petition must be filed before the day of the applicant’s 21st birthday. A petition filed on the birthday itself does not qualify.

Second, the calendar date of birth, rather than the specific hour of birth, determines whether an applicant was under 21 at the time of filing. The AAO rejected the argument, drawn from a Second Circuit citizenship case called Duarte-Ceri v. Holder, 630 F.3d 83 (2d Cir. 2010), that the day of a birthday should be treated as divisible into hours for the purposes of the age calculation.

These holdings apply nationwide to every SIJS petition USCIS adjudicates going forward. The AAO originally entered this decision on March 5, 2025. It was designated as precedent on September 23, 2026, meaning today. The delay between initial decision and precedent designation is more than 18 months, which itself is worth noting.

The Story: A Week That Cost Her SIJS Eligibility

Ms. Borges Borsoi was born on March 8, 2002, in Imperatriz, a city of about 250,000 people in the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão. On Wednesday, March 1, 2023, a week before she would turn 21, she went to the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court to seek a dependency order and the special findings that SIJS requires. Two days later, on Friday, March 3, 2023, the court held a hearing and issued its judgment. The court determined that Ms. Borges Borsoi, then 20 years old, was an unmarried juvenile ward under Massachusetts law and dependent upon the court. The court found that her reunification with her mother was not viable because of neglect and abandonment, and that returning her to Brazil was not in her best interest.

She had exactly the state court predicate that federal law requires. She needed only to get her federal SIJS petition to USCIS before her 21st birthday, five days away.

She mailed her petition on Monday, March 6. That was two days before her birthday. She sent two additional copies on Tuesday, March 7, presumably as a hedge against loss. USCIS received all three packages on Wednesday, March 8. That was her 21st birthday. USCIS denied all three petitions on the same ground: she was not under 21 on the date USCIS received them.

What makes her situation especially difficult is that a policy change came too late to save her. During the pendency of her denied petition, USCIS began allowing SIJS applicants approaching their 21st birthday to file in person at USCIS field offices within a two-week window before the birthday. Had that option been available to Ms. Borges Borsoi in early March 2023, she could have walked her petition into a USCIS office on Monday, March 6, or on any earlier date after March 3, and had it stamped as received before her birthday. She would have qualified. But in-person filing for SIJS was not yet available to her at the time she needed it.

She appealed to the AAO. She argued, on the reasoning of Duarte-Ceri, that because she was born in the afternoon in Brazil, and because her petition was received on the morning of her 21st birthday in the Eastern Time Zone, she was still hours “under” 21 at the moment of receipt. The AAO rejected that argument and dismissed her appeal. Her decision includes a standard notice at the end, warning that applicants who are not lawfully present may be subject to removal proceedings under INA § 240 through the issuance of a Notice to Appear, which is the document that starts the removal case.

The Massachusetts state court found that her mother had neglected and abandoned her, that she should be a dependent of the court, and that returning her to Brazil was not in her best interest. The same federal government whose regulation defines SIJS eligibility has now told her that her mailing missed a filing deadline by hours, that no other pathway is available to her under this program, and that she may face removal to the country the state court said she should not return to.

Why the Filing Date Rule Now Bites Harder

Under USCIS regulations, the filing date of a petition is the date USCIS receives it, not the date the applicant mailed it. This is set out at 8 C.F.R. § 103.2(a)(7)(i), which provides that USCIS records the receipt date “as of the actual date of receipt at the location designated for filing such benefit request whether electronically or in paper format.” Postmarks do not count. Mailing dates do not count. Whatever happens between the time a petition leaves the applicant’s hands and the time it lands at USCIS is not part of the filing analysis.

This rule has always been in place. What Matter of Borges Borsoi does is restricts how the receipt date interacts with the 21-year age rule. Even if a petitioner reasonably believes their birthday should not count against them, or that they were still under 21 at the specific hour their petition arrived, the AAO has now held that neither of those beliefs will save the petition. If USCIS date-stamps the petition on the 21st birthday, the petition is denied.

The practical consequence for SIJS practice is that the last-day-of-eligibility mailing strategy is dead. Anyone who has been counseling clients that mailing on the last business day before the 21st birthday is enough needs to change that advice. In-person filing at a designated USCIS field office, when available, is now the safest approach in the final two weeks before the birthday. Overnight courier services with next-day delivery, sent multiple days in advance, are the second-best approach. Regular mail sent within a week of the birthday is a losing strategy.

The Divisibility Argument the AAO Rejected

Ms. Borges Borsoi’s appeal relied on Duarte-Ceri v. Holder, 630 F.3d 83 (2d Cir. 2010), a Second Circuit case that used what is sometimes called the divisibility method to count age. In Duarte-Ceri, the court held that a day is a divisible unit of time and that a person’s hour of birth determines eligibility for derivative United States citizenship under a former INA provision. The Duarte-Ceri court reasoned that when the stakes are as high as citizenship, the “most precious right,” the law should recognize that a person born in the afternoon has not lived a full calendar year until the afternoon of their next birthday.

The AAO in Matter of Borges Borsoi distinguished Duarte-Ceri on several grounds. It noted that SIJS is not citizenship. It observed that the Duarte-Ceri court itself said the divisibility method should apply in rare circumstances and should not be extended broadly. It pointed to English common law authorities holding that a day is legally indivisible. It observed that many federal courts use “under 21” and “before the 21st birthday” interchangeably. It cited the practical burden of asking USCIS to verify the exact hour of birth for petitioners from countries whose birth certificates do not record time of birth. And it observed that a divisibility rule would produce arbitrary results based on time of day (a petitioner born at 12:01 a.m. would effectively lose a day compared to one born at 11:59 p.m.).

The AAO concluded that the divisibility method “could also undermine a state juvenile court’s independent age determination” because state juvenile courts have their own age limits for taking jurisdiction and USCIS does not go behind state court age findings.

The AAO’s reasoning is defensible on its own terms. What it does not do is grapple seriously with the equities of a petitioner who did everything the statute requires except beat the postal service. The decision treats the outcome as a natural consequence of the regulation’s plain language and the common law rule that a day is indivisible. The petitioner’s situation is described in factual terms, and then the analysis moves on.

What This Means for State Juvenile Court Timing

SIJS is unusual in immigration law because it requires the applicant to obtain a state court order before filing anything with USCIS. The state court process is separate, has its own rules and timelines, and depends on state law about juvenile jurisdiction. In many states, the state juvenile court’s own jurisdiction to enter a dependency order ends when the young person turns 18, or 21, depending on state law. Massachusetts, where Ms. Borges Borsoi obtained her order, allows dependency findings up to age 22 in certain circumstances. Other states are more restrictive.

Under Matter of Borges Borsoi, the practical implication is that the state court process should be started as early as possible in the year before the 21st birthday, ideally with several months of buffer. Ms. Borges Borsoi obtained her state court order five days before her birthday, which was legally sufficient for the state court to have jurisdiction under Massachusetts law but left almost no margin for the federal filing. If the state court hearing had been continued for a week, or if the court had taken any time to issue its written findings after the hearing, the federal filing deadline would have been unachievable regardless of mailing choices.

Practitioners should plan backwards from the 21st birthday. Identify the state law age limit for the juvenile court’s jurisdiction. Identify the state court’s calendar and typical timeline for dependency hearings and issuance of orders. Add a substantial buffer for federal filing, ideally at least 30 days. If the applicant is already within 60 days of the 21st birthday, treat the case as urgent and coordinate the state court petition, the SIJS findings request, and the federal filing preparation in parallel.

What Matter of Borges Borsoi Does Not Change

Matter of Borges Borsoi is significant, but its scope has limits worth stating clearly.

The decision does not eliminate the TVPRA age-out protection. Under section 235(d)(6) of the TVPRA, an SIJS petition may not be denied “based on age if the alien was a child on the date on which the alien applied for such status.” This protects applicants whose petitions are filed before the 21st birthday but not adjudicated until after. The applicant who files at age 20 does not lose eligibility because USCIS takes two years to decide the petition. What Matter of Borges Borsoi addresses is the filing date itself, not the adjudication date.

The decision does not change the substantive SIJS eligibility requirements. State court dependency findings, the abuse, neglect, or abandonment finding, the best interest determination, and the unmarried requirement all remain the same. What changes is a specific procedural rule about how to count the filing date.

The decision does not affect the state court process directly. State juvenile courts continue to apply state law when deciding whether to take jurisdiction and issue dependency orders. State age limits for juvenile jurisdiction vary and are set by state law.

The decision does not eliminate federal court review of USCIS denials. An applicant whose petition is denied on Matter of Borges Borsoi grounds may seek review in federal district court under the Administrative Procedure Act. The specific arguments available depend on the circuit and the facts.

The decision does not change the general availability of adjustment of status (the process of applying for a green card from within the United States) for SIJS beneficiaries who obtain SIJS classification through timely-filed petitions. For those who beat the deadline, the pathway to a green card remains available.

What to Do If You Are Approaching 21 and Pursuing SIJS

If you are approaching your 21st birthday and pursuing SIJS, or if you have a family member or ward in that situation, the following steps are worth taking immediately.

Retain an experienced immigration attorney who handles SIJS cases. This is a specialized practice area with technical requirements and time-sensitive deadlines. Do not attempt to handle the state juvenile court process and the federal SIJS petition process without counsel.

Identify the state court’s age limit for taking juvenile dependency jurisdiction. This is a matter of state law and varies significantly. In some states the limit is 18. In others it is 21. In Massachusetts it can be 22 in some circumstances. Your attorney should know this from the outset.

Start the state court process early. Getting a dependency order and SIJS findings from a state juvenile court can take weeks or months depending on the court’s calendar and the complexity of the case. Build in significant buffer time before your 21st birthday. If you are already within six months of turning 21 and have not yet started the state court process, treat this as urgent.

Do not rely on mail alone for the federal filing when you are close to the deadline. If your USCIS field office offers in-person filing for SIJS applicants approaching age 21 (this option has been available at select offices since the Borges Borsoi period), use it. If in-person filing is not available, use overnight courier service with tracking, sent multiple days before the birthday, and confirm delivery to the correct filing address.

Keep documentation of everything. Keep copies of your state court order, your I-360 petition, all supporting documents, all mailing receipts, all delivery confirmations, and all correspondence with USCIS. If anything goes wrong, this documentation is your evidence base.

If your petition has already been denied on Matter of Borges Borsoi grounds, do not assume the case is over. Talk to an attorney about whether federal district court review under the Administrative Procedure Act is available in your circumstances, and about what other immigration options may exist based on your specific facts.

What Attorneys Handling SIJS Cases Should Do

Immigration attorneys who represent SIJS applicants need to treat Matter of Borges Borsoi as a fundamental change in the filing strategy for any client approaching the age of 21.

Update client intake to identify the age cutoff issue immediately. Every SIJS client should have their exact date of birth calculated against the 21st birthday from the first meeting. Any client within 12 months of turning 21 should be treated as time-sensitive.

Build a state court timeline that leaves at least 30 days between issuance of the SIJS-related findings and the 21st birthday, and ideally more. Coordinate with juvenile court staff on hearing scheduling. Where possible, request expedited hearings for age-cutoff cases.

Use in-person filing at USCIS field offices whenever available for clients approaching the 21st birthday. Confirm the specific field office’s current in-person filing policy for SIJS. If in-person filing is not offered locally, use overnight courier service with delivery confirmation and send well in advance of the birthday.

Preserve the record for federal court review. If a client’s petition is denied on age grounds, the record built at the AAO stage is what a federal district court will examine. Document every relevant fact about the timing of mailing, receipt, and any in-person filing attempts.

Coordinate with juvenile court practitioners and guardians ad litem in your community. State juvenile court practitioners may not be aware that their scheduling decisions have immediate federal consequences for their SIJS-eligible clients. A shared understanding of the deadline dynamics can help avoid future Matter of Borges Borsoi outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

If USCIS receives my SIJS petition on my 21st birthday, can I argue that I was still 20 when I mailed it?

No. Under 8 C.F.R. § 103.2(a)(7)(i), the filing date is the date USCIS receives the petition, not the date you mailed it. Matter of Borges Borsoi confirms that a petition received on the 21st birthday itself is untimely for SIJS purposes. Postmarks and mailing dates do not save the petition.

What if I was born in the evening in a country ahead of Eastern Time and USCIS received my petition in the morning of my birthday Eastern Time?

Under Matter of Borges Borsoi, the hour of birth does not matter. The calendar date of birth alone determines age for SIJS purposes. This is exactly the argument Ms. Borges Borsoi made, and the AAO rejected it.

Does the TVPRA age-out protection help me if I filed on my 21st birthday?

No. The TVPRA age-out protection at section 235(d)(6) protects applicants whose petitions are filed before the 21st birthday but not adjudicated until after. It does not extend to petitions filed on the birthday itself. Matter of Borges Borsoi is about the filing date, and the TVPRA protection presumes a timely filing.

If my state court has not yet issued its dependency order and my 21st birthday is coming up, what can I do?

Talk to your attorney immediately about requesting an expedited hearing or an expedited written order from the state court. Some state juvenile courts will accommodate age-cutoff urgency if the request is made clearly. Your attorney may also consider whether a hearing transcript with oral findings can serve as an interim document if the written order is delayed. Time is the critical variable.

Can I file a Form I-360 SIJS petition in person at a USCIS field office?

USCIS has expanded in-person filing options at select field offices for SIJS applicants approaching their 21st birthday, typically within a two-week window before the birthday. This option was not available to Ms. Borges Borsoi in early 2023 but has been implemented at some offices since. Contact your local USCIS field office or work with your attorney to confirm whether in-person filing is available in your area.

If USCIS denies my petition on Matter of Borges Borsoi grounds, what are my options?

You can appeal to the AAO, but under Matter of Borges Borsoi the AAO is unlikely to reverse if the facts are similar to those in this case. You may be able to seek review in federal district court under the Administrative Procedure Act. Whether other immigration relief is available depends on your specific circumstances and should be evaluated by an experienced immigration attorney. Do not assume the denial is the end of your options.

Where can I find Matter of Borges Borsoi?

Matter of Borges Borsoi, 30 I&N Dec. 67 (AAO 2026), is a precedential decision of the Administrative Appeals Office designated as precedent on September 23, 2026, as Interim Decision #4248. The decision was originally entered on March 5, 2025. It is available here and through the Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review website and through the USCIS AAO decisions library.

Why Novo Legal

Novo Legal Group is a bilingual, community-rooted human rights firm. Every attorney on our team is fluent in English and Spanish. We publish same-day analysis when federal decisions shift the ground under our clients, because we know our clients need to make decisions with the current state of the law in view. Our team handles humanitarian immigration cases including SIJS petitions, VAWA self-petitions, U visas, T visas, asylum, and adjustment of status. We also handle removal defense in immigration court, appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and petitions for review before federal courts of appeals. Matter of Borges Borsoi is exactly the kind of decision where preparation and timing determine whether a young person’s pathway to safety in the United States survives. If you have a family member or ward approaching their 21st birthday and pursuing SIJS, or if you have a denial you would like to discuss, contact us.

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