Jain v. Jaddou

Background

The ten plaintiffs are foreign nationals who filed Form I-526 petitions in 2019 under the EB-5 Regional Center immigrant-investor program. They each invested at least $500,000 in a new commercial enterprise. At the time the complaint was filed, their petitions had been pending between 17 and 25 months. Five plaintiffs resided in the United States in lawful nonimmigrant status, while the others resided outside the United States.

The plaintiffs sued under the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to finish matters within a reasonable time and allows courts to compel agency action that has been unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed. They sought a preliminary mandatory injunction—an emergency order requiring USCIS to act—before June 30, 2021, when congressional authorization for the Regional Center program was scheduled to expire. Tracy Renaud was identified as the senior official performing the duties of the USCIS Director and opposed the motion.

Legal standard

The court applied the four preliminary-injunction factors: likelihood of success on the merits, likely irreparable harm without an injunction, the balance of hardships, and the public interest. Because the requested order would require USCIS to take affirmative action rather than merely preserve the existing situation, the court treated it as a particularly disfavored mandatory injunction.

To evaluate the plaintiffs’ unreasonable-delay claim, the court considered six factors commonly known as the TRAC factors. They examine whether the agency follows a reasonable decision-making rule, whether Congress supplied a timetable, the effect of delay on health and welfare, the interests harmed by the delay, the effect of moving the plaintiffs ahead of other agency priorities, and whether improper conduct contributed to the delay.

Court’s analysis

The court found that the first TRAC factor favored USCIS. USCIS’s “visa availability” approach first gives priority to petitions for which visas are available, then considers factors including whether the related project has already been reviewed and generally uses filing order within its workflows. The court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that USCIS had to use a single rigid priority rule. Although the court agreed that USCIS’s reduced productivity was significant and not fully explained, it found the plaintiffs’ evidence too limited to show that USCIS was not actually applying its stated approach.

The second TRAC factor was neutral. Congress had not set a specific processing deadline for Form I-526 petitions. A statute expressing Congress’s view that immigrant-benefit applications should generally be completed within 180 days was informative but did not create enforceable rights and was not directed specifically to Form I-526 petitions.

The third and fifth factors, concerning health, welfare, and the interests harmed by delay, favored USCIS. The plaintiffs described economic, lifestyle, and personal hardships, including difficulty supervising investments, dissatisfaction with living arrangements, and stress. The court found that they had not persuasively shown the type of serious health or welfare harm that would support a mandatory preliminary injunction. The possibility that the program might expire also did not establish that their applications would disappear or that they would be moved to the back of the line. The court noted that the program had been reauthorized several times and that new reauthorization legislation had been introduced.

The fourth factor also favored USCIS. The plaintiffs had not shown why their petitions should be placed at the head of the queue while similarly situated applicants waited. The court reasoned that advancing these ten petitions could simply move other applicants back without producing a net gain in processing. The sixth factor, concerning improper motive, was irrelevant to the court’s analysis because the plaintiffs’ supporting blog posts and news articles did not provide meaningful evidence of bad faith.

The court therefore concluded that the plaintiffs had raised serious questions about USCIS’s productivity but had not shown a likelihood of success on their claim that USCIS unreasonably delayed their petitions. The court separately found that irreparable harm was not likely. The plaintiffs were not certain to receive EB-5 visas, had not shown that their applications would disappear if authorization expired, and primarily identified economic harm, which could generally be addressed through money damages. The balance of hardships did not significantly favor either side, and the public-interest factor favored USCIS because moving these plaintiffs ahead of other applicants would not promote faster processing generally.

Disposition

The court DENIED the plaintiffs’ motion for a mandatory preliminary injunction. The opinion did not state that it entered a final judgment on the underlying unreasonable-delay claims.