Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Writs of Mandamus in the context of US Immigration primarily. Primarily what we deal with here in our office when we deal with US Immigration, it is going to be Fiancé Visas, Marriage Visas so the K-1, K-3, CR-1 and IR-1; we do occasionally have people contact us regarding Tourist Visas but Tourist Visas and Writs of Mandamus, you usually don't see those come up in the same context with one another.

What is a Writ of Mandamus? A Writ of Mandamus in layman's terms is basically it is a petition to the Court to compel a Government Agency to basically do their job; it's telling them to do it. So when you have something that's sitting in front of an Immigration service for example and they are just not moving things forward - again there are certain time frames that are reasonable that we are used to dealing with where look that's the process, that is how long it takes. Then there is where it becomes unreasonable and during COVID and things and especially in Trump's Administration, there was a lot of stuff that was becoming just unreasonable for no good reason, there's some argument to be made for filing a Writ of Mandamus depending on the circumstances. Out here, I don't deal with them so much, they may come up from time to time in the context of a given case but when looking at the cost benefits of them, first of all you have got to look at overall timing and that is have you actually waited a period of time that has become unreasonable, there's something to look at there. If you just file like a case and then immediately file a Writ of Mandamus that may not be looked at so well.

Meanwhile and something to understand here is Writs of Mandamus may not work out the way you think they will work. I have seen this happen before where a Writ of Mandamus has come down and basically the agency has said "oh yeah, yeah, okay we'll go ahead and do that."  Denied! I've seen that happen. I have also seen and this is kind of a little different where you get a Writ of Mandamus to deal with one segment of the Immigration process and okay, they go ahead and process something through and then it's going to go over to another agency that has authority in the Immigration process and I'm not sure that they talk to each other but it wouldn't shock me if they did, but long story short, you just now play 'hurry up and wait' again, is my point. I am not saying there is not a lot of different contexts where Writs of Mandamus are very necessary, what I am saying is these are not something to be wielded for lack of a better term ‘ham-fistedly’, they are not something to be taken lightly and lay people might not fully understand the total implications associated with filing a Writ of Mandamus in a case for a US Visa because they may not be looking at the big picture. They may think they understand what they are dealing with but in reality they do not understand that Writs of Mandamus can be a double-edged sword.