USCIS, Sept. 25, 2024 "Policy Highlights • Clarifies that USCIS calculates the CSPA age of an applicant who established extraordinary circumstances and is excused from the sought to acquire...
NILA, Sept. 25, 2024 "Increasingly, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and other immigration agencies are challenging venue in U.S. district court lawsuits brought by noncitizens...
This document is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on 09/26/2024 "Eligible citizens, nationals, and passport holders from designated Visa Waiver Program countries may apply for admission...
Mazariegos-Rodas v. Garland "Beky Izamar Mazariegos-Rodas and Engly Yeraicy Mazariegos-Rodas (collectively, the Petitioners) are two sisters who are natives and citizens of Guatemala. The Petitioners...
Cyrus Mehta, Sept. 23, 2024 "When the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) designated Matter of Z-A- Inc . as an “Adopted Decision” in 2016 it was seen as a breakthrough as it recognized...
[Xie v. Kerry, 21 F. Supp. 3d 89 (D.D.C. 2014) reversed.]
"The D.C. Circuit axed a win for the U.S. Department of State on Monday in a suit accusing it of illegally slowing down reviews of certain Chinese individuals' visa applications, saying the plaintiff deserved to have her claim examined and that the case record was a “black box” on how immigrant queue lengths are determined.
In a victory for plaintiff Meina Xie, the three-judge D.C. Circuit panel reversed the dismissal of her case, which deals with the cut-off dates for Chinese applicants of an EB-3 visa subcategory, known as “EWs.” These employment-based visas are intended for workers in jobs that require less than two years of training and for which there aren’t enough U.S. workers.
Xie, a Chinese native with an approved EW petition, has allegedly been waiting in the State Department’s immigration queue for over eight years. She launched her suit against Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013 over claims that the department is intentionally delaying the EW cut-off date for Chinese petitioners." - Allissa Wickham, Law360, Mar. 10, 2015.
"As to the determinants of the length of immigrant queues, the record provides little more than a black box. ... the parties haven’t furnished any relevant regulations which would reveal State’s view of how it meshes the categorical caps, the priority rule, and the other statutory directives, much less the thinking behind that view, and we have found none that do so." - Xie v. Kerry, Mar. 10, 2015. [Hats off to Christopher A. Teras!]