DACA Renewal Delays Push Lawyers Toward a Mass Mandamus Filing

DACA renewals are supposed to be the most routine filing USCIS handles. In 2026 they have become one of its most unpredictable — and a group of veteran immigration litigators is now preparing a coordinated federal-court response.

USCIS’s public processing-times tool currently shows 80% of Form I-821D renewals completed in roughly three and a half months at its service-center operations queue. Recipients on community forums report a very different reality: some renewals approved in days, others — filed earlier — pending for half a year or more.

The stakes are higher than for most delayed benefits. Unlike many renewal categories, a pending DACA renewal does not extend the old work permit — when the EAD expires, work authorization ends that day, as the National Immigration Law Center has documented. People lose jobs, and with them car payments, mortgages, and employer-sponsored insurance, while a fully paid application sits in a queue.

Congress has started to press the agency. Senators Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján wrote to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow on March 19, 2026, demanding the agency reduce renewal delays. Representative Gabe Vasquez sent his own letter to Edlow on May 20, calling the surge in pending renewals a source of constant instability for families in his district.

For an individual whose renewal has fallen outside the posted processing time, the established tool is a writ of mandamus — a suit in federal district court under 28 U.S.C. § 1361, usually paired with an unreasonable-delay claim under the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706(1), which lets a court “compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed.” The relief is a decision, not an approval. Courts cannot order USCIS to grant DACA; they can order it to stop sitting on the file.

The mechanics favor plaintiffs. Once served, the government has 60 days to answer under Rule 12(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — and in practice, the Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to defend a two-year-old renewal delay usually calls the agency and asks it to adjudicate the case rather than brief it. The problem is cost. A competently filed individual mandamus runs thousands of dollars in attorney fees, aimed at exactly the population that may have just lost work authorization. Pre-litigation demand letters, the traditional cheap first step, no longer get read.

That cost problem is what the mass-action model is built to solve. Kuck said on his June 10 broadcast that he has been talking with Jesse Bless of Bless Litigation and Greg Siskind of Siskind Susser — his partners in the IMMpact Litigation consortium — about a joint filing for delayed DACA renewals.

A mass action instead joins 50, 100, or 200 named plaintiffs in one complaint, each paying a fraction of an individual filing’s cost. The IMMpact firms have used the structure before — including a class suit with the American Immigration Council over I-601A waiver delays that documented processing times ballooning from 4.5 months to over 31 — and the same playbook is already running against EAD delays.

Venue, Kuck said, will be chosen deliberately: likely Boston or California, not the District of Columbia, and “certainly not going to file in Texas.” He told viewers a decision on whether the group goes live, with onboarding details posted to the firms’ websites, should come by early next week.

One deliberate limit: the contemplated filing covers renewals, not advance parole. Some advocates worry that a high-profile group suit over DACA travel documents could provoke the administration into moving against the program itself. Kuck said he doubts that — and noted a renewal backlog suit carries a different calculus, because losing a work permit means losing a job — but the group has so far kept advance parole out of scope.

Hanging over all of it is the program’s own litigation. The Fifth Circuit ruled in January 2025 that DACA’s work-authorization component is unlawful but narrowed the remedy to Texas, and the case has been back before Judge Andrew Hanen in the Southern District of Texas since the mandate issued that March, with supplemental briefing closed since late last year, per the Congressional Research Service’s litigation summary. Kuck’s read: no ruling before fall, possibly not until after the November midterms, because neither side of the political aisle wants DACA live on the ballot. In the meantime, USCIS can deny renewals but — under the existing court orders — cannot stop processing them.

For recipients deciding what to do this week, the practical sequence from the broadcast was simple:

• File renewals a full year before expiration — the earliest point USCIS accepts them — rather than the 120–150 days the agency suggests.
• Check your receipt date against the posted I-821D processing time; once you are outside it, you can submit a formal case inquiry and a congressional inquiry.
• If the delay has cost you a job or is about to, a mandamus — individual or mass — is the remedy that has a track record of producing decisions.