Chen v. Wolf

Background

Jianfeng Chen, a citizen of China, was admitted to the United States as a conditional permanent resident on December 19, 2001, based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen. He later filed petitions seeking to remove the conditions on his residence. His first petition was denied after he failed to attend an interview, and his conditional permanent resident status was terminated. In a second petition, Chen sought a waiver of the joint-filing requirement, but he admitted during an interview that his marriage had been fraudulent. USCIS denied that petition because he had not shown that the marriage was entered into in good faith.

During removal proceedings, Chen received a waiver under 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(1)(H), referred to in the opinion as a fraud waiver. The waiver eliminated removal based on his inadmissibility for marriage fraud, and an immigration judge granted the waiver on October 10, 2019. Chen then applied for a replacement permanent resident card. USCIS denied that application on July 21, 2020, reasoning that Chen was not eligible for a replacement card because his petition to remove the conditions on his residence had been denied.

Claims and positions

Chen sued under the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, which allows a court to set aside agency action that is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise unlawful. He moved for summary judgment, asking the court to reverse USCIS’s decision. Chen argued that the agency improperly relied on a regulation concerning denial of a petition to remove conditions and failed to consider the effect of the fraud waiver on his immigration status.

The defendants cross-moved for summary judgment. They argued that the fraud waiver only eliminated Chen’s removability based on fraud; it did not remove the conditions on his permanent resident status. They contended that Chen needed to file another petition to remove those conditions and obtain its approval before he could receive a replacement permanent resident card.

Court’s analysis

The court considered whether USCIS’s denial was arbitrary and capricious. It explained that the fraud-waiver statute addresses removal based on fraud or misrepresentation but does not expressly state the waiver’s effect on a noncitizen’s immigration status. The court rejected the defendants’ reliance on Vasquez v. Holder because that decision addressed whether the fraud waiver applied to removal based on termination of conditional permanent resident status, not whether the waiver changed the person’s current immigration status.

The court agreed with Chen that the defendants had not identified a workable way for him to remedy his status. Chen could not file a joint petition with his former spouse because they had not been married since 2004. The court also concluded that the good-faith-marriage waiver was unavailable because Chen had admitted that the marriage was not entered into in good faith. The proposed extreme-hardship waiver was not a viable option either. The relevant hardship period was the two-year period during which Chen held conditional permanent resident status, which ended nearly 18 years before the court’s decision. The court found that the defendants did not explain how Chen could establish hardship based on that period, particularly when the circumstances he identified involved his later spouse and children.

The court characterized Chen’s situation as a procedural “limbo”: it stated that he was lawfully present and not subject to removal, but that the agency’s denial left him without a plausible, non-futile way to obtain a permanent resident card. The court held that USCIS had entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem and therefore vacated the denial as arbitrary and capricious.

Disposition

The court granted Chen’s motion for summary judgment and denied the defendants’ cross-motion for summary judgment. It vacated the USCIS decision denying Chen’s application for a replacement permanent resident card. The opinion’s reproduced conclusion is incomplete after stating that the parties shall act within 14 days; no additional directive is summarized here.