N-400 Delay Lawsuit: Ohio Green Card Holder Sues USCIS

An N-400 delay lawsuit filed in federal court in Ohio asks a judge to force USCIS to act on a citizenship application that has sat for about 18 months without an interview. The case, brought by a green card holder who has lived in the United States as a permanent resident since 2002, lands as the national naturalization backlog passes 800,000 and puts a spotlight on the hardest kind of delay to challenge: the one that happens before USCIS ever schedules an interview.

The plaintiff, Meng Ju Liu, a Taiwanese national who also goes by Michael Liu, filed his Form N-400 on April 25, 2025, and sued on Oct. 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Newsweek reported on Oct. 22. According to the complaint as described by Newsweek, he asks the court to order the government to finish his record and background security checks within 30 days and, if he clears them, to decide his application within 30 days after that. Newsweek said it had asked DHS, USCIS and the Justice Department for comment; no response was reported. So far Newsweek is the only outlet to report the case.

The timing explains why a single applicant’s suit matters. USCIS had 813,453 naturalization applications pending at the end of August 2026, with 513,462 of them waiting more than six months, according to agency figures reported by IANS and covered here on Oct. 21. Bloomberg Law reported that USCIS decided about 71,000 naturalization cases from April to June 2026, against about 265,000 in the same months of 2025. Liu’s wait is also well beyond the agency’s own yardstick: the processing time USCIS posts for its Cincinnati office was 9.5 months for 80 percent of cases, Newsweek reported.

Why the N-400 delay lawsuit has to rely on mandamus

Naturalization law gives applicants a strong remedy, but only at a late stage. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1447(b), if USCIS has not decided a case within 120 days after the naturalization examination, the applicant can ask a federal district court to decide it or send it back with instructions. Liu has never been examined, so that clock never started.

That leaves the tools available for any stalled federal decision: the Mandamus Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1361, and the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to conclude matters “within a reasonable time” and lets courts compel action “unreasonably delayed.” Most courts judge these claims under a six-factor balancing test from a 1984 D.C. Circuit case, Telecommunications Research & Action Center v. FCC, which asks whether there is a “rule of reason” for the timing, whether Congress set a timetable, and whether forcing a decision would simply move one applicant ahead of others waiting in the same line.

That last factor is where the government usually pushes back, and the size of today’s backlog cuts both ways. A queue of more than 800,000 gives the agency an argument that judges should not reorder it case by case. But Congress has also stated, in 8 U.S.C. § 1571(b), its sense that immigration benefit applications should be processed within 180 days of filing. While this law is incredibly useful for making a case in court, it has an important limitation. Because Congress used the phrase “it is the sense of Congress,” the 180-day window is legally considered a guideline rather than a strict, mandatory deadline. The law does not automatically penalize USCIS or force an approval if they miss the 6-month mark. An 18-month wait without even an interview notice is far outside both that benchmark and USCIS’s own posted time. The open question in cases like Liu’s is how much weight a court gives to a nationwide slowdown the agency has not publicly explained.

The request for relief is also narrower than it may sound. A court can order USCIS to finish background checks and make a decision, but it cannot order the agency to approve. If the security checks or the interview raise questions, the application can still be denied, and any answers on the form remain subject to the kind of later scrutiny seen in this month’s noncitizen voting prosecutions and criminal denaturalization cases.

What to watch in the Ohio case

When the United States or its officials are sued, the federal rules give the government 60 days after service to respond. The first signal will be whether the government moves to dismiss, defends the delay on the merits, or sends an interview notice, which could leave little for the court to decide. For the hundreds of thousands of applicants in the same queue, each filing in the case will show how the government is defending the pace of naturalization decisions, a slowdown that NPR reported had cut monthly approvals to about a third of their recent pace. USCIS’s next quarterly data release, covering July through September, will show whether that pace is changing.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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