I-526 EB-5 Approval Through The Use Of A Mandamus Lawsuit

We had to sue the Department of Homeland Security, the California Service Center, and USCIS, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Why? Because seven families have been just waiting far too long. What do you do if the government just doesn’t adjudicate your case? This was a mandamus lawsuit. Some of them have been waiting for over 10 months, and some of their friends have been waiting for over 20 months. In failing to adjudicate their case, they cannot travel, they cannot work, and their life is at a standstill. They practically might as well be in prison. It’s a grave violation of their human rights.

We officially filed a lawsuit on February 2nd, and by February 10th, the first approval already came in. By March 29th, we officially withdrew because all the cases got approved. Let’s get to it. 

Now, before diving into the case, I just want to say we do not encourage mandamus actions. We really want to treat it as a last resort. I know many firms and many dear colleagues disagree with us; they want to directly jump into the federal lawsuit because they know that there’s no other way. In this case, there really is no other way, so we had to do it as well, jump on the bandwagon, sue the government, and get that approval.

But typically, we do a motion to reopen; we try to expedite; we have all these other videos to talk about how we do a motion to reopen and how we do expedited service. In this case, the seven families, most of them don’t know each other, some were in North Carolina or Chicago, some were in Cerritos, California, right next to us, Maryland, Pennsylvania. We brought the seven families together because they shared an underlying fact pattern: they were all EB-5 investors waiting for their green card to adjudicate, but it’s taking forever.

First, they need to get their EAD, and their employment authorization card; they need their travel permit, but it’s just taking forever. It used to only take three months to four months. Some of them have been waiting over 10 months, and some of their friends have been waiting for 20 months or so. They couldn’t bear the idea of not being able to work for that long. They couldn’t bear the idea of not being able to travel, especially during a pandemic where some of them needed to leave to care for their elderly.

So, because they couldn’t wait anymore after a lot of discussion, we put the case together, we filed it, and the case was approved. There’s a lot of reasons why we brought seven families together. One reason is that it saves costs, so everybody shares in legal fees. But another reason is because it adds to the oomph of what we’re trying to file. So, in the facts and procedural history of this case, where we laid out the history and the story of the seven applicants, it’s so powerful. We talked about one person needing to financially support his wife, needing to drive to work; he couldn’t get a driver’s license.

Another person has a 90-year-old mother living in a pandemic-stricken country and is dying and needs to travel. Another person just got a new job offer that’s really great, and their job and their livelihood in their career is dependent on the adjudication of their status. Combined together, it paints a picture about how inadequate the adjudication process is and the adverse consequences it’s having on a multitude of people and their storylines.

So all of that lays down the groundwork for why we filed, why the government needs to adjudicate now. It gets to the argument, right? Because you can’t just say we’ve been waiting too long; please expedite us. The government isn’t just going to grant you because you’re impatient. So why should the government approve your case? And this is where a really good fact-finding team can come up with really good arguments.

Normal processing time: four months. Historically, over the past two to three years, we went through every single quarter, all the government memos that went out talking about how fast they adjudicate these cases. But we found, and this is like the gold, we found in one of the memos, it only takes 12 minutes. Yet for our clients, it’s taking close to 10 months to adjudicate some of these cases. So that is extremely unreasonable.

We went back to the government’s own statistics in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. We showed the government, “This is how fast you used to do it in every single quarter of every single year, and this is what we were expecting, and this is what they relied on.” However, we understand COVID, but it is still unreasonable because it’s way too long.

Oh, and on paragraph 78, while USCIS attributes case backlog to the ASC closures, there is nothing in the regulations that require biometrics to approve the 765 or I-131. All of this is to assume that the government is going to rebut our argument, saying, “No, no, no, no, no, it’s taking a long time on us, but it’s not our fault; it’s the ASC and ASC the biometric centers; they are closed down because of COVID.” So it’s nobody’s fault. So we really just preemptively argued, “Sorry, you cannot use that excuse.”

This was a mandamus lawsuit that was filed in February. Within eight days, the first applicant already got their approval, and the work permit and the advanced parole were already being mailed to them. And within a month, one by one, their cases just got approved, and then we got to close the case.

There’s so much about mandamus that I could talk about, but we just want to lay it out here just to let you know if you’ve tried everything you could possibly do to expedite your case, it is unreasonable, and it’s having an adverse effect. If you run out of options, right, mandamus is a method of checks and balances for the courts to make sure the government is adequately adjudicating your case. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We’re going to make other videos talking about mandamus and the behind-the-scenes stuff, so stay tuned. Take care. Bye.