Abdiev v. Garland

Background

Marat Abdiev, a citizen of Kyrgyzstan who resides in Manhattan, filed an application for asylum on March 5, 2020. The application had not been acted on when he filed this case on September 14, 2023; the opinion later noted that more than four years had passed without a decision. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had not scheduled his initial interview.

Abdiev sued Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, USCIS Director Ur Mendoza Jaddou, and Asylum Office of Newark, New Jersey, Director Susan Raufer. He sought a writ of mandamus—a court order requiring a government official to perform a legally required duty—and also challenged the delay under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). He argued that Defendants had a duty to schedule his interview and had unreasonably delayed processing his asylum application.

Defendants moved to dismiss the mandamus claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1), which concerns subject-matter jurisdiction, and the APA claim under Rule 12(b)(6), which concerns whether a complaint states a legally sufficient claim.

Mandamus claim

The court explained that mandamus is an extraordinary remedy. To obtain it, a plaintiff must show a clear right to the requested relief, a plainly defined and mandatory government duty to perform the act, and no other adequate remedy.

The Immigration and Nationality Act states that initial asylum interviews should generally occur within 45 days and final administrative adjudication should generally occur within 180 days. But the same statute states that those provisions do not create a legally enforceable substantive or procedural right against the United States, its agencies, or its officers. Relying on that language and decisions from courts in the circuit, the court held that Abdiev had not shown a clear right to an interview or adjudication within those time periods. The court therefore denied his application for a writ of mandamus.

APA claim

The APA permits a court to require an agency to take a discrete action that the agency is legally required to take when the agency has unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed that action. The court evaluated Abdiev’s claim using six factors commonly used to assess unreasonable agency delay, including whether the agency follows a rational scheduling rule, the effect of expediting one case on higher-priority agency work, the harm caused by the delay, and whether the agency acted improperly.

The court concluded that USCIS’s “Last In, First Out” scheduling system was a rational response to the asylum backlog, even though it caused older applications to wait longer. The court also concluded that ordering USCIS to expedite Abdiev’s application could move it ahead of other applicants and harm the agency’s handling of similar applications. The statutory processing periods did not favor Abdiev because the statute makes them unenforceable. Although the court recognized the burden caused by years of uncertainty and family separation, it concluded that the asserted harms did not, at that time, weigh in favor of finding an APA violation. The court found no allegation of bad faith, making the final factor neutral.

Disposition

The court granted Defendants’ motion to dismiss without prejudice and closed the case. The opinion states that the dismissal was without prejudice to renewal if Abdiev’s asylum application remained pending without a decision to an unreasonable degree. The court cautioned that its ruling did not mean USCIS could delay the application indefinitely.