Child Status Protection Act

What is the Child Status Protection Act? How can this help me?

The Child Status Protection Act, or CSPA, was a law enacted in 2002 to freeze/preserve an immigrant’s child status, so they avoid “aging out” before receiving a visa.

If you are a parent and you want to bring your child into the U.S. as a beneficiary, child status includes individuals who are unmarried and under 21 years old—as defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA. Before this Act, if a parent filed an application for their child when they were under 21, but their visa was approved after they turned 21 due to long processing times, they no longer had child status. CSPA creates different ways to freeze a child’s age, depending on if they are immediate relatives, preference relatives, asylee applicants, etc.

Immediate relatives, or IRS, include the spouse of a U.S. citizen, the unmarried child under 21 of a U.S. citizen, and the parent of a U.S. Citizen. In these cases, a child’s CSPA age is frozen when the Form I-360 or I-130 is filed, when the parent files their petition. After this point, as long as the applicant remains unmarried, they cannot “age out” due to waiting for the filing to be approved.

For family-sponsored and employment-based immigrants, however, the CSPA age is not frozen solely based on filing time. Instead, USCIS provides a formula:

Age at time of visa availability - Pending time = CSPA Age

Say the child (still unmarried) is 21 years and 4 months when their visa becomes available, but their petition was being processed for around 6 months. In that case, 21 years and 4 months - 6 months = 20 years and 10 months, and the applicant is considered a child under CSPA.

CSPA applies to all of the following in different ways: immediate relatives (IRs), family-sponsored preference principals and derivatives, VAWA petitioners, employment-based derivatives, DV derivatives, derivative refugees and asylees.