Is Your Immigration Case Delayed?
“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.”
If the immigration service has delayed making a decision in your case, you are not alone.
Immigration law changes plus a record number of pending applications has doubled or even tripled processing times for most cases. Some cases are being delayed far beyond what is considered a normal processing time.
If you’ve tried calling immigration, filing service requests and contacting Congress, you’ve reached the end of what you can probably do on your own to get your case unstuck. But don’t give up! There’s still hope.
The best way to move your case forward may be in filing a suit against the United States government.
Suing the government might sound scary. It’s certainly a complex endeavor.
We call a case against the immigration services a “mandamus” lawsuit. Here are some examples of cases where mandamus may get a case unstuck:
You had your naturalization interview a few months ago, but you have not received your oath ceremony notice.
You filed an I-130 petition for your spouse and have been waiting over a year with no decision.
You filed an I-140 petition for an employee and have been waiting months with no decision.
You attended your immigrant visa interview at the consulate a year and have been told your case is in “administrative processing” with no estimate of when you’ll get a decision.
These delays are not just frustrating. Your entire life is on hold because the immigration services are not doing their job in processing your case.
Sometimes, waiting for an answer is the right thing to do. But in other cases delays can be dangerous and directly result in a denial of the case. A delay could mean that personal facts or the immigration law itself changes while you are waiting and you lose your case because a decision was not made in time.
Don’t let inaction destroy your chance to live your American Dream. Join me on Thursday for a live Facebook Q&A on how to get your case unstuck through mandamus.