Background
The case involves U-visa petitioners, including survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting and their family members, who were placed on a waiting list due to annual caps. The Service granted deferred action to domestic petitioners and conditional parole to overseas petitioners. The petitioners sued, alleging the Service failed to provide the specific form of parole or advance parole required by the waiting list regulation.
The court’s reasoning
The court held that the waiting list regulation uses the disjunctive ‘or,’ granting the Service discretion to provide either deferred action or parole, not both. For domestic petitioners, the Service properly granted deferred action. For overseas petitioners, the court found their claims moot because the Service had already provided the relief requested: conditional parole and the process to obtain travel documents. The court further determined that the jurisdictional bar on reviewing discretionary parole decisions did not apply to the domestic petitioners’ claim that the Service violated its own regulations, but the claim lacked merit on the merits.
What it means going forward
Domestic U-visa petitioners on the waiting list cannot compel the issuance of advance parole alongside deferred action. Overseas petitioners must complete identity verification and biometric checks to utilize their conditional parole; they cannot litigate the sufficiency of the parole approval process after receiving it.