What happened
A District of Columbia federal judge has dismissed a family's suit seeking to force the government to make a final decision on their employment-based immigrant visa applications, ruling that the alleged delay did not plausibly state an Administrative Procedure Act claim.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali granted the government's motion to dismiss and dismissed the case without prejudice, concluding that the D.C. Circuit's TRAC unreasonable-delay factors favored dismissal. The opinion says Antonio Rondon Moreno, his wife Zaira S. Martinez Partida and his daughter sued to compel action after their applications remained in administrative processing.
The family lives in Mexico, according to the opinion. Rondon Moreno's I-140 petition was granted in November 2022, and he and his family applied for immigrant visas in April 2023. A consular officer interviewed them in Mexico in April 2024 and told them at the end of the interview that the applications were being referred for administrative processing.
Judge Ali said the applications had been pending about two years and three months in total, and about one year and four months since the government's last action, when the case was filed. Even accounting for additional time since the complaint, the judge said the delay remained within the range courts have found consistent with a rule of reason and had not reached the level needed to tip the first two TRAC factors toward the plaintiffs.
The court also found the human-welfare factors neutral, saying the complaint did not allege specific harms caused by the delay severe enough to offset the other factors. Although the plaintiffs later pointed in briefing to employment and medical-treatment consequences, the opinion said factual allegations raised for the first time in an opposition brief could not be considered on a motion to dismiss.
The fourth TRAC factor favored the government, the court held, because compelling action on the family's applications would merely move them ahead of other applicants without any alleged broader reduction in delay. The opinion said the sixth factor was neutral because the plaintiffs did not allege bad faith.
Judge Ali acknowledged the broader context, writing that there was no denying the "troubling backlog" of visa applications and its disruption of lives. But the court said binding precedent required dismissal because the plaintiffs had not stated a claim entitling them to relief.