Visagate Update: FOIA Filed

This blog has been covering #Visagate2015 since its inception. The lawsuit, Mehta v. DOS, requested a Temporary Restraining Order for the purpose of reinstating the original October Visa Bulletin. The revised version made major rollbacks on the filing dates. The November Visa Bulletin retained the filing dates on the categories that suffered the rollbacks through the October revision.

The most recent update is that the American Immigration Council has filed Freedom of Information Act Requests with the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Service. This should help demonstrate why DOS retracted its original visa bulletin and how it did its math. The bulletin is an estimation and attempts not to waste immigrant visas, but the estimations are difficult because the percentage allocations for each category and the moving parts involved. For example, the EB-2 category for India and China has extraordinary backlogs. Approximately 28.7% of employment-based immigrant visas are reserved for EB-2. Then there are per country quotas, plus unused EB-1 immigrant visas that roll into potentially available EB-2 visas.

The American Immigration Council is attempting to uncover the rationale for the changes in the revised bulletin.

Some Updates on #Visagate2015

We have been following #Visagate2015 closely for updates on the lawsuit (Mehta vs. DOS, to reinstate the original October Visa Bulletin). One of the more touching parts of the ordeal thus far is that thousands of bouquets of flowers have been delivered to the Department of Homeland Security. Applicants who sent their Green Card applications on October 1 had delivery rejected.

The October Visa Bulletin introduced the modernized visa system that President Obama’s executive actions promised in November 2014. The modernized visa system shows both filing and action dates. This means that someone who is eligible for an Immigrant Visa can file earlier and begin the process, rather than waiting to file when the priority date is current. This great news for thousands of individuals (the lawsuit claims 30,000 are affected) was hocus-pocused two weeks later when the Visa Bulletin was revised with severely rolled back filing dates. The revised bulletin, issued September 25, came 6 days before thousands of hopeful applicants were filing their applications for Permanent Residence. Many of the applicants have been waiting for years and years for their dates to become current.

Individuals with family-based Immigrant Visas have been adversely affected, but it is the employment-based individuals who are the centerpiece of the lawsuit and receiving much of the attention. The tech industry and business community have rallied behind their employees with a letter to the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the White House. An excerpt from the letter:

The rescission of the promise of “adjustment” and the concrete interim benefits associated with these applications with only three days warning before the filing period commenced—and well after preparations already triggered legal fees and costs—was both heartbreaking for these immigrants and deeply troubling for all who observed the process. It is also important to note that the original and revised October 2015 visa bulletin both include a 41-month retrogression for EB-2 India and a 23-month retrogression for EB-2 China, compared to the August 2015 visa bulletin. At the outset of the federal government’s fiscal year, when the entire array of 140,000 immigrant visas are available, it is puzzling to see the contraction of immigrant visa availability and further deepening of the green card backlog.

This is a truly unfortunate example of poorly-conceived execution by your respective departments, one that furthers, rather than mitigates, an ever-growing impairment to our country’s ability to attract and retain the best talent in the world.

As for the actual lawsuit, a ruling on the temporary restraining order might be issued today.