Does USCIS or the State Department get mad when we sue them?
Hi. I'm Jim Hacking immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our offices in St. Louis Missouri and San Diego, California and now Washington D.C.
I was talking to Haley our paralegal about what questions people have about lawsuits and she has some good suggestions for me and I'm going to make them into videos and in this video I want to answer some questions that people have. They want to know, am I going to be treated differently at my interview because I sued them or are they going to be extra hard on me because I sued them or are they going to be mad at me because I sued them?
The interesting thing is that when you sue the federal government, you're asking them to do something that they are legally obligated to do. I remember when I was a brand new immigration litigator and I started filing lawsuits here in St. Louis against the USCIS. My uncle at the time was the first assistant US attorney, so he was the number one US attorney underneath the political appointee US attorney. He was my idol. He was why I went to law school and I remember that I had sued them on a Friday in a big class action for 36 people that I was trying to get citizenship for, and my mother just happened to schedule a dinner where my uncle was going to be coming over and I was very worried about facing my Uncle Michael. I thought he might disapprove of the fact that I had sued them, and I remember he walked out and said to me "Jimmy. I hear you used the government? How dare you sue them to ask them to do something they are legally obligated to do" and we had a good laugh, right.
So, at the end of the day you're just asking bureaucrats, you know federal employees to do their job. You have the right to do it. The law says that you can do it and nobody really gets mad. I've honestly never seen in the 800 times that I've sued them any indication that they get mad or take it personally and that makes sense. You're really just asking them to do their job. You're really just asking them to fulfill the requirements of their job and you're not asking for them to be fired. You're not asking them to go to jail. You're not asking for them to pay you any money. You're just asking them to finish something that they started long ago and that they promised that they would. At the end of the day the lawsuits are sort of separated out even from immigration or the State Department. In other words, the lawsuits are handled by the US attorneys in the city in which we sue them, so we obviously file a lot of our lawsuits in Washington D.C. Those cases are handled by the US attorney and then be an attorney for the agency that we're suing.
I don't think it really trickles down even to the low-level people the fact that we've sued. Now, it does in the terms of they start moving faster and they get the decision going. They know conceptually that they have been sued, but the frontline officers aren't really that involved in it. We don't name them as defendants and so there's not really a lot of anguish or anxiety on their part or anger towards us for having sued them, so I don't think that these are the kinds of things that you need to worry about if you're thinking about suing them or if you have sued them and you have an interview coming up. I don't think you need to worry about it. They're not taking it personally. It's just business as they said in the Godfather.
If you have questions about suing them or if you have sued or want to sue, give us a call 314-961-8200. You can email us [email protected]. You can find us on our Facebook group it's called Immigrant Home. We'd love to have you in there and then of course we have our YouTube channel that we update every single day with a new video. We'd love to have you subscribe to our channel, so that whenever we do publish a new video, you get alerted right away. You'll also get alerted on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we go live in the Facebook group and on YouTube answering as many of your immigration law-related questions as possible.
Thanks a lot and we'll see you next time.
