A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has dismissed a Pakistani family's lawsuit over a 29-month visa delay, ruling that the wait is not yet legally unreasonable. The decision, reported by the Tampa Free Press on August 18, is the latest in a series of 2026 rulings from the same courthouse dismissing visa-delay suits — and it landed in the middle of an active conversation among immigration attorneys about where, and against which agency, mandamus cases are still moving.
The ruling
Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the suit brought by Uzair Abbas and his family, whose family-based immigrant visa applications have been in administrative processing since February 2024 — 29 months. The underlying petition dates to 2006, when Abbas's uncle petitioned for Abbas's mother.
Judge Mehta applied the six-factor TRAC test that D.C. courts use to measure agency delay. Per the Tampa Free Press report, he noted that past court decisions generally treat immigration delays of three to five years as legally acceptable, and found that the 180-day period associated with administrative processing is a goal, not a binding deadline — Congress never set one for visa background checks.
The rulings before it
The Abbas decision follows a consistent line out of the same court this year.
In April, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan dismissed Sadiq v. Rubio, a B1/B2 visitor-visa delay case. The court measured the delay from the applicant's most recent application — nine months — rather than from his original 2018 request, and rejected the request to advance his case on the ground that it would simply move every other applicant back one space.
Days earlier, Judge Randolph D. Moss dismissed a Canadian EB-2 applicant's suit over more than 18 months of post-interview administrative processing, holding that a Section 221(g) refusal is itself a decision and that consular officers have no clear legal duty to complete adjudication within any specific timeframe.
Both decisions rest on precedents attorneys in this space know well: Sarlak v. Pompeo (D.D.C. 2020) and Giliana v. Blinken (D.D.C. 2021). In Giliana, the court acknowledged the delay was long but said it had no basis to reorder the State Department's priorities.
One more event for context: Judge Mehta is the same judge who ruled on July 31, in De Moura Gomes v. Rubio, that the State Department's blanket refusal policy for nationals of 75 listed countries violates the INA.
What attorneys are reporting
John Q. Khosravi, publisher of the Immigration Lawyers Toolbox, posted the Tampa Free Press story on LinkedIn: "Mandamus lawsuits for immigration case delays are not working like they used to. Judges are denying cases despite long delays. Apparently, 2+ years is no longer considered unreasonable!" Asked whether this is jurisdiction-specific or nationwide, he answered that it was "strongly jurisdiction based for the last five or six years," but that he is starting to see it creep into formerly friendly jurisdictions.
Federal immigration litigator Prashant Dubey wrote in the same thread that he and co-counsel stopped filing these suits in D.C. in January 2021:
You have cases like Sarlak and Giliana already stacked against you, which state administrative processing is unreasonable at the 5+ year mark. Anything less is not worth litigating in DC.
Boston-area attorney Jennifer Bade reported live filings with mixed results so far: "We have a few mandamus petitions in the pipeline right now. Our natz based mandamus went just fine, jury is out on others pending."
At the same time, attorneys handling delays on the USCIS side — I-485s, asylum interviews, work permits — are reporting approvals within weeks of filing.
Gozel Law (@amerikadaavukatiniz), a firm with a large Turkish-speaking client base, listed its recent results in an August 6 reel: a marriage-based green card in Colorado, pending over a year, approved without an interview about a week after the mandamus filing — the firm says the federal judge cut the government's usual 60-day response time to seven days. A Georgia marriage case pending one year and ten months, approved without an interview. A case pending two years and nine months, approved after a NOID response. An asylum-based green card pending 16 months in Pittsburgh, approved without an interview. Speaking in Turkish, the firm's founder put it this way:
Even under the Trump administration, federal mandamus cases are going very well. (Translated from Turkish: "Trump yönetimi esnasında bile federal mandamus davaları çok iyi gidiyor.")
In an August 18 reel, the same firm cited USCIS's own data for a pending-case backlog rising from 9.7 million to 11.3 million and gave a timeline for a case at the Arlington asylum office: mandamus filed May 6, 2026; interview July 24; approval August 3. The firm said it is now filing mandamus actions for work-permit delays of more than three months — "these cases are currently going successfully" (translated from Turkish: "bu davalar şu anda başarılı gidiyor").
Other attorneys are posting the same kind of reports. Toland Law wrote on August 1 that USCIS had ignored a client for three years, and after a mandamus filing "the case moved in 60 days." San Diego immigration attorney @sdimmigrationlawyer posted on August 12 that "more than six months of complete silence with no meaningful action is classic unreasonable delay territory." Joseph Botelho's firm published an explainer on August 19 with the mechanics: "A mandamus lawsuit doesn't ask USCIS to approve your case — it asks a federal judge to make them decide it." And @theimmigrationattorneys noted on August 5 that a demand letter can be a cost-effective step before a mandamus filing, which is expensive.
The filings are not limited to attorneys. A DACA recipient posting as @mexicanaenmiamii documented filing a writ of mandamus pro se over a renewal delay — filed July 13, approved days later, after 185 days of waiting — in a TikTok series that has drawn tens of thousands of views.
Why this matters
The dismissed cases and the reported wins sit on different dockets. The dismissals above are consular cases: State Department administrative processing after a visa interview abroad, typically filed in D.C., where the TRAC case law now includes dismissals at nine months, 18 months, and 29 months. The reported approvals are domestic USCIS cases — I-485s, asylum interviews, EADs — filed in the applicant's home district, where the government frequently resolves the underlying application rather than litigate.
That distinction is the practical takeaway practitioners in Khosravi's thread were debating: which agency is being sued, and in which court, currently says more about a delay case's prospects than the raw length of the wait. A client whose I-485 has been pending 14 months and a client whose immigrant visa has been in administrative processing for 29 months are in different legal positions — even though the second client has waited longer.
What to do now
- Separate the two dockets in your delay triage. USCIS-side delays (I-485, I-765, asylum interviews, naturalization) and consular administrative-processing delays involve different defendants, different venues, and different unreasonable-delay case law.
- In consular cases, count the delay the way the court will. After Sadiq, D.C. judges may measure from the most recent application or interview, not from the start of the client's overall wait.
- Know the current D.C. numbers before filing there. This year's dismissals came at nine months, 18 months, and 29 months, with the court citing three to five years as the range past decisions treat as acceptable.
- Set client expectations by delay type, not delay length. A shorter USCIS-side delay may be more actionable than a longer consular one.
- Mandamus compels a decision, not an approval. A compelled adjudication can be a denial or a NOID — one of the cases above came back as a NOID that then had to be fought and won. Screen the underlying case before filing.
Every case differs; these are general observations drawn from court rulings, press reporting, and attorney commentary, not legal advice for any particular matter.