Complaints in Court, Suing the Immigration Department

As many of our clients know, we are quite aggressive when dealing with the Immigration Department.  We are always looking to make them accountable for incorrect requests, clarify strange petitions, etc.

An example of this is that whilst the law states that they have 90 days to respond to an application for Residency, it is well known that they simply cannot comply with such a deadline. Consequently, in our effort to push cases forward, what we generally did was to file a complaint in court essentially suing the Department to force them to comply with the 90-day rule.

However, throughout the course of the last months, this strategy, far from being useful, has resulted in a series of rejections. Immigration has basically adopted the following stance: if you sue us, we will issue a final act, find anything in the file regardless of how small, even if not in the law, and reject the application. This is evidently incorrect and against the Immigration law and ruling that specifically says that when an application is incomplete, the Immigration Department must issue a prevention or exigency and allow the applicant enough time to correct, amend or explain.

Consequently, whilst we will fight this new approach, we will need to change our strategy pertaining to lawsuits. We will need to use the tools the Immigration Department provides until things settle down and we manage to ensure that a lawsuit will not be equal to a rejection for things that are not even featured in the law!