RFE on Prong 1 and 3
I recently received RFE on the national importance part of Prong 1 and Prong 3. PD was June 2025 and I applied for PP on Feb 27. The law firm is EP.
I am a fourth year PhD student in CS at a top 30 US university. My proposed endeavor is about speech privacy and low cost hardware implementations. My lawyer said the RFE is minimal in the sense that it is only 2 pages and asked for specific evidence showing broad impact of my work in regards to national importance and Prong 3 in general that it would be beneficiary for the US to waive the labor certification.
The plan my lawyer made is to provide more direct evidence connecting my endeavor directly to US govt/military interests and said this case doesn’t require anything else. I want to directly give an argument for prong 3 regarding the economic impact of my work, but the lawyer insisted that it would not be required as our whole petition is based on academia and we didn’t claim about the economic impacts in the petition, nor did the officer ask for it specifically.
They also think LoRs aren’t necessary for my case and explained that since we met prong 2 and half of prong 1, it might hurt us more than they might help- diverting attention from our documents to the LoRs. But I am insisting on the LoRs, and they agreed to take a look at maximum 2 letters and will only add if they think that it might be helpful (they will not help in drafting).
Asking opinions if this strategy is sound. If I should draft 2 LoRs, should they be from people who cited my papers or can be it from people who worked with me at very high level (people with very high credentials)? How should I draft the LoRs? Can they be high profile professors? Do they have to be US citizens? Not getting any guidance for this from EP.