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Mandamus Lawsuit: Does It Only Work in Delayed Citizenship Cases?

 

Most people think that a mandamus lawsuit is the only way to get their citizenship case moving forward. However, there may be other ways to get your case moving. In this blog post, we'll discuss some of those methods and how they can help you get the process started. 

Keep in mind that while these methods don't always work, they're worth a try if you're feeling stuck in your citizenship case. 

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Hi, I’m Jim Hacking, an immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in St. Louis, Missouri, San Diego, California, and Washington D.C. We’ve had a lot of success in suing the federal government agencies, USCIS, and the Department of Homeland Security when our clients’ naturalization cases have taken too long.

What does the law say?

The law says that if you’ve had your naturalization interview and 120 days have gone by, you can go into federal court and ask a federal judge who doesn’t work for the immigration service to decide your case, or the judge can decide on his or her own initiative whether or not you get to become a citizen.

The immigration service doesn’t like it when you sue them, and they don’t like the idea that a federal judge will take their job from them. When you file a lawsuit, typically, what happens in most cases is they decide the case. 

The case gets moving, and cases that have been waiting for two, three, or four years can finally get resolved. That law, regarding the 120 days, is a pretty black letter, and the immigration service doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room. One of the tricks they try is they don’t schedule the interview right away.

Sometimes we’re filing lawsuits for naturalization applicants who have never had their interview because that doesn’t start that 120-day clock, and that’s why they do it. We have had success in getting those cases moving. 

They’re not as highly successful as the ones where there’s been an actual interview, but we’ve probably filed suit on behalf of about 70 people who’ve been waiting for citizenship, and the lawsuits generally work. They don’t work in every case, but they work in most cases. 

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We wondered whether or not we’d be able to file these kinds of lawsuits and other cases in the immigration context, cases in which naturalization was not an issue, but rather someone could get a green card.

Case #1

One day a young man came to see me, and he had filed his own writ of mandamus against the immigration service because his green card case had been pending too long. 

They hadn’t scheduled him for an interview, and his case had been pending for two years. He and his wife were getting frustrated that every time they went down to the immigration office, they couldn’t get any answers. He figured out how to draft a lawsuit and filed it on his own in federal court. We don’t recommend this.

Filing a mandamus action is actually pretty tricky, and the government agencies were starting to play games with him, trying to change the venue and filing a motion to dismiss and all these things. We wanted to see what would happen, and we took this case. 

It turns out that the lawsuit worked almost the exact same way in the green card context as it did in the citizenship context. Since that time, we’ve probably filed 10 green card delay lawsuits, and we’ve had a lot of good success with that.

Case #2

Then one day, a lady came to see me, and she was wondering about her husband’s visa case. He was from Pakistan, and his case had been pending for two years. We told her that she should sue them. She was sort of skittish and worried about suing them, so she didn’t do it. 

A year later she came back and now she’d been waiting three years. We told her, “You should sue the state department.” We had done some research and figured out that you could, in fact, sue the state department in federal court in the United States for a delay at an embassy overseas.

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She was still skittish and still scared, so she decided not to do it. The fourth year she came back, and she said, “Okay, Jim, let’s go ahead and sue.” We filed the lawsuit, and within 90 days after filing the lawsuit, her husband was in the United States with an approved visa. 

This was remarkable, and it only happened because we filed the lawsuit. Now we know, and we have subsequently filed more lawsuits against the state department for delays in the issuance of a visa.

Case #3

Last month, we filed a lawsuit over a four-year delay on an asylum case. We’re very interested to see how this case works. It’s a lawsuit against a Chicago asylum office where a man has been waiting for four years for his asylum case to be approved. 

These are the kinds of things that you can do with a mandamus lawsuit. Not every immigration lawyer is familiar with the rules of a federal court and filing lawsuits. I had been a litigator for 10 years before I started practicing immigration law, so I feel very comfortable in federal court, in the procedures, the filing requirements, and all those things.

We’re going to file a new lawsuit today over in Ohio. We’re excited about that for a young man who’s been waiting for citizenship for two and a half years. These lawsuits work. They don’t work every time, but they work in a lot of situations.

Reach Out to Us!

If you’ve been experiencing some kind of immigration delay, make sure to give us a call at 314-961-8200. You can also e-mail us at [email protected] for professional legal assistance. We hope you find this post helpful and instructive.

If you have any questions about it, make sure to reach out to us. If you want to subscribe to our Youtube and Facebook channels, that would be great. You’ll get updates whenever we upload a new video.

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