After the Dorcas Vacatur, USCIS Is Still Fighting 39-Country Cases

A federal court vacated the USCIS 39-country adjudication pause nationwide on June 5. Six days later, the policies are legally dead — and, according to attorneys with cases caught under them, functionally still alive.

Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr.’s 135-page opinion in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS set aside four policies that had frozen green cards, work permits, naturalization, and asylum for nationals of 39 countries, finding each unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act. Vacatur under 5 U.S.C. § 706(2) takes effect when ordered. The government has not moved for a stay — which means, on paper, USCIS should be adjudicating these cases right now.

Charles Kuck, whose Atlanta firm has three 39-country cases pending in federal court, told viewers of his June 10 broadcast what happened when his team asked the government to comply.

His firm has filed the Dorcas opinion as a notice of supplemental authority in each of its parallel 39-country cases — a TRO matter in Georgia, a case awaiting a ruling in Colorado, and a fully briefed preliminary-injunction motion in the District of Columbia. The Cato Institute and the National Law Review both read the ruling the same way the plaintiffs do: the freeze was unlawful from the start, and there is no order anywhere preserving it.

The sharpest picture of the standoff came from a second case in Maryland. Government counsel asked the plaintiffs to consent to an extension of her briefing deadline. They named their price.

The government then filed its own motion for a continuance before the plaintiffs could respond, and the judge granted it within minutes — giving the agency two more weeks to answer while its clients’ work permits sit expired. An Assistant U.S. Attorney telling opposing counsel she cannot deliver adjudications, days after the underlying policy was vacated, is the compliance story in miniature.

None of this is unfamiliar. The first Trump administration’s DACA rescission died the same procedural death — an APA ruling that the government had not followed the rules — and the agency took months to conform its practice. USCIS has also publicly said nothing about how it will implement Dorcas; advocacy groups tracking the case, including #AfghanEvac, are telling affected applicants the ruling is effective immediately while warning that an appeal is expected.

On the appeal, Kuck is not predicting relief for the government at any level.

His reasoning tracks the post-CASA landscape: the Supreme Court left APA vacatur intact when it curtailed universal injunctions, and the Dorcas record — no notice-and-comment, no reasoned explanation, nationality treated as a “significant negative factor” — is the kind of clean APA violation appellate courts rarely rescue.

For applicants from the 39 countries whose cases are still frozen, the practical guidance from the broadcast was concrete:

• If you have no case in court and your benefit is still being held or was denied under the vacated memos, file suit now — the vacatur removes the government’s only legal cover. For paused family cases, the I-130-first mandamus strategy still applies.
• If you already have a case pending, have counsel demand adjudication in writing and move for a TRO if the agency refuses — continued reliance on a vacated policy is itself a fresh APA violation.
• Watch the docket, not the press release. Until a stay issues — and none has — the pause has no legal force anywhere.

The multi-plaintiff suits already running against the related country-hold practices suggest where this goes next: if USCIS keeps applying a vacated policy, the fight stops being about the memos and starts being about whether the agency obeys judgments at all.