SAN DIEGO (CN) — Some undocumented immigrants who say U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services passed over their U Visa applications have standing to sue, a federal judge in the Southern District of California ruled Tuesday afternoon.
U visas — special visas given to immigrant victims of certain crimes — provide a faster pathway to citizenship compared to traditional visas. Created as part of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act of 2000, U visas are intended to help law enforcement investigate serious crimes like trafficking, torture and murder, and are meant to encourage more reporting of crime in undocumented immigrant communities.
The act sets an annual cap of 10,000 visas. An applicant can only become eligible if certifying agencies, such as law enforcement, deem them fully cooperative in helping to catch a criminal.
The plaintiffs say they filed for U visas in 2017, but have languished on a waitlist ever since. They say that their applications have been passed over in favor of applications filed after 2017, in a violation of immigration services' own regulations, which state that the oldest applications are to receive the highest priority.
The plaintiffs say that these delays deprive them of actual immigration status, block their ability to accrue time toward their adjustment of status application and prevent them from acquiring advance parole to travel abroad.
The plaintiffs sued Ur Jaddou, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last June, claiming that she and department violated the Administrative Procedure Act by delaying their petitions.
U.S. Senior District Judge Thomas Whelan, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote in his 12-page opinion that the plaintiffs properly stated a claim for relief under the Administrative Procedure Act because immigration services had engaged in “unreasonable delay,” in processing the applications.
In asking Whelan to dismiss the suit, immigration services had argued that the delays were not unreasonable and that the plaintiffs were not next in line, as they claim.
"Plaintiffs sufficiently alleged that the requested relief is likely to prompt defendant to evaluate the status of plaintiffs’ petitions and consider their own failure to issue a final decision," Whelan wrote. "Plaintiffs sufficiently alleged that defendant’s delay in adjudicating their petitions violates either the APA’s mandate that non-discretionary decisions be made within a reasonable time or USCIS’s own regulation governing the order in which petitions are adjudicated."
Immigration services challenged the redressability of the plaintiffs’ claims, but Whelan said the plaintiffs' established that it was likely for the court to find a remedy for them in their amended complaint.
"After this lawsuit was filed, several of the original plaintiffs received an intervening final agency decision. Thus, at least 'some possibility' exists that USCIS reconsidered and acted on those pending petitions," Whelan said.
Whelan also dismissed a handful of derivative plaintiffs’ from the case. While some of the original 24 plaintiffs were voluntarily dismissed over lack of jurisdiction, other plaintiffs were dismissed from the action because immigration had since processed their applications, rendering their claims moot.
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