Does suing USCIS help your immigration application move faster?

Kind of a second installment to a previous post about asylum seekers turning to the courts to move their application along after long delays

Photo by Matteo Paganelli on Unsplash

A few months ago I wrote about asylum seekers who are suing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services because of long delays in the application process.

Those lawsuits, according to attorneys involved in the cases, are the result of a relatively recent backlog of immigration applications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.

Many of the immigrants filing these lawsuits, including the ones in my previous post on this issue, came to the U.S. to escape the persecution they would face in their home countries for being gay or for supporting the wrong political party. The longer their applications are left in limbo, the more they worry about deportation.

I wanted to go back a little further in time to see if other lawsuits against USCIS have gotten results.

In at least two, they did.

Both were in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, which covers San Diego. I obtained court records for both cases in person at the federal courthouse in downtown San Diego, so I only have paper copies, otherwise I would have linked to the documents.