A Judge Ordered Her Naturalization in 90 Days. USCIS Re-Interviewed Her

A naturalization case that a court had already ordered USCIS to decide came up on the Immigration Answer Show. It wasn’t a caller’s question. It was something founding attorney Jim Hacking had flown to Houston to handle in person. His client, a breast-cancer researcher, had passed her interview and then waited past the statutory window, so she went to court and won a remand sending the case back to USCIS with a deadline to act. USCIS responded by scheduling a second interview.

The tool here is 8 U.S.C. § 1447(b). Once USCIS lets more than 120 days pass after the naturalization examination without deciding, the applicant can ask a federal district court to decide the case itself or to send it back to USCIS with instructions. Hacking paired that with a mandamus action under 28 U.S.C. § 1361, and a judge on senior status sent the N-400 back with 90 days to adjudicate.

The second interview wasn’t a substantive review. The officer asked whether the applicant had been arrested or divorced since the first interview, then went back over a civics answer about naming two cabinet positions, because the first officer had allegedly written down “Department of Human Services” instead of Health and Human Services. The applicant, a doctor, had answered it correctly. Her own read, as Hacking relayed it, was that the agency is doing this on purpose: “they’re really being picky right now.”

A re-interview after a court deadline isn’t, on its own, a sign of denial. USCIS keeps the authority to re-examine, and a supervisor cleaning up a sloppy first record is a believable explanation. What it costs is time. A clock the court set in days gets spent on travel and logistics for questions that change nothing. Hacking’s response was the right one: show up, keep the record clean, and let the deadline do the work, the same posture behind a pre-litigation demand that becomes a filed mandamus.

The takeaway for applicants is narrow. A court order under § 1447(b) doesn’t stop USCIS from asking questions. It stops the agency from sitting on the case and doing nothing. The practical move is to document the first interview carefully and treat every civics and good-moral-character answer as something an officer might revisit, so a clean naturalization record doesn’t get reopened over a typo.