Navigating Matter of Dhanasar in 2026: what adjudicators actually look for in Prong 2

Matter of Dhanasar replaced the NYSDOT framework a decade ago, and by now every practitioner can recite the three prongs. What has changed is where petitions actually fail. Prong 1 — substantial merit and national importance — is comparatively forgiving, because a well-chosen endeavour in a field with government attention is straightforward to substantiate. Prong 3 is an argument about the practicality of labor certification that turns on framing more than evidence.

Prong 2 is different. It asks a question about a person: is this beneficiary well positioned to advance the proposed endeavour. It is the only prong where the record has to be about the individual rather than about the field, and it is the prong that generates the overwhelming majority of the Requests for Evidence we see in National Interest Waiver filings.

The recurring failure is a substitution. A petition establishes that semiconductor supply chain resilience is nationally important, cites the CHIPS Act, attaches three government reports, and then asserts that the beneficiary — a process engineer with eleven publications — is therefore well positioned. The reasoning never closes. Importance of the field is Prong 1 evidence. It does not carry over.

An adjudicator reading Prong 2 is looking for the mechanism by which this specific person advances this specific endeavour. That means a record of past achievement in the same endeavour, evidence that others in the field have adopted or built on the work, and a plausible account of what happens next. The strongest Prong 2 sections read like a causal chain rather than a credentials list.

Citation reports remain useful, but they have been devalued by overuse and by the ease of generating them. A Scholar export with no capture date, no self-citation treatment and no field baseline tells an adjudicator very little. Pair the number with context: what is the median citation count for a paper in this subfield at this career stage, and which specific papers cite the beneficiary in a way that shows they built on the work rather than listing it.

Expert letters carry more weight than citations when they are genuinely independent, and less than nothing when they are not. Independence is now assessed structurally. A letter from a co-author, a colleague at the same institution, or a collaborator on the same grant is not independent regardless of how it is described. Build the letter roster deliberately: identify the six to eight people in the field who have used the work and have no relationship to the beneficiary, and accept that this takes weeks.

• State the capture date and self-citation treatment on every citation exhibit.
• Attach a signed CV as a sub-exhibit to each expert letter.
• Disclose and explain any relationship between the beneficiary and a letter author.
• Give each expert a different aspect of the work to address — templated letters are visible.

An adjudicator spends fifteen to twenty minutes on an initial petition. In that window, every factual assertion in the cover letter needs to resolve to a page they can find. 'The beneficiary's method has been adopted by three national laboratories' is a strong sentence only if it is followed by a citation to Exhibit 6.2 at pages 118 to 131 and that range genuinely contains the adoption evidence.

This is not a legal problem — it is an assembly problem, and it is the reason a petition with excellent evidence can still draw an RFE that asks for evidence already in the record. Over forty percent of employment-based RFEs cite material that was filed and simply could not be located. That is an indexing failure wearing the costume of an evidentiary one.