Class Action Lawsuit Against USCIS Filed in
California
A class action lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court
for the Central District of California, on behalf of thousands of
immigrant families whose children were wrongfully denied visas. The
suit seeks to compel the United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services (USCIS) to issue the now-adult children visas in accordance
with provisions of the Child Status Protection Act (CSPA).
Congress enacted CSPA to keep children, the derivative beneficiaries
of their parents’ visa petitions, together with their families.
Prior to CSPA, children who reached 21 years of age were no longer
eligible to derive immigrant visas from a parent who was the
principal beneficiary of an immigrant visa. This is because upon
reaching 21, the adult children no longer qualified as “children”
according to the definition of a child in the Immigration and
Nationality Act (INA). Section 3 of CSPA, codified as INA §
203(h)(3), remedied the problem by allowing children to
automatically convert the visa petition and retain their parents’
earlier visa filing date, or “priority date.”
The suit alleges that although USCIS has granted some visa petitions
pursuant to INA § 203(h)(3), there is no uniformity in the
application of CSPA by the USCIS. The class action lawsuit seeks to
compel USCIS to properly adjudicate all cases filed under CSPA, and
uniformly comply with the requirement of allowing children to retain
their parents’ original priority date in subsequent petitions field
by the parents.
Copyright © 2001-2008 Greenberg Traurig All Rights Reserved.
|
