Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Writ of Mandamus. I have done videos in the past on this topic; what is this? Well the Writ of Mandamus is effectively a Writ one would file with a Court of Competent Jurisdiction wherein you are asking for a remedy in the Court that is basically akin to "hey do your job!" What do you mean here? 

Okay let's say you file a petition for an Immigrant Spouse Visa, let's call it the IR-1 Visa. You file that, nothing happens on your case for years, they just say "hey we received it", or more often than not "it is under review!" At a certain point and again it is going to be fact dependent, but at a certain point, you have to ask yourself hey, they are not doing anything on my case, should I file a Writ of Mandamus with the Court asking the Court for a remedy and the remedy being the Court ordering the Government agency to do their job and adjudicate the petition. 

Now there are pros and cons to this. This should not be something, people that have filed the case and been waiting around for a few weeks or something and they say "I have read about this Writ of Mandamus, I want to file one of those and get this moving." That is not in my opinion generally a good strategy. Writs of Mandamus, in my opinion should be used with some degree of circumspection; you need to be getting to parameters that are unreasonable. Again I have discussed this in other videos, I don't love that the USCIS puts up their "estimated processing times" or this notion that there even is a “normal processing time” because I have just been watching the system for too long, and especially now where I think the overall system is kind of broken, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to how these cases are processed at times. I would stress that there's an example of this insofar as I have had cases where we have thrown it in the hopper and then boom it just comes right back out, no explanation why. I don't know why. Maybe it just happened to hit the desk of somebody at an opportune moment and they just said oh it is sitting here, they adjudicate it and move the case on. I don't know. Again rhyme or reason doesn't seem to really exist in the calculus of trying to figure out processing times. Now that said, I have seen Writs of Mandamus work; I've worked on cases involving Writs of Mandamus. One thing I would say that most folks do not think of, is within the overall Immigration Process, a Writ of Mandamus that is brought against one agency may not necessarily apply to another agency that may have a hand in processing the overall case. This can be a real downside factor when looking at Writs of Mandamus. So what am I talking about here? A case for example that isn't even outside of normal processing times, I've seen folks oftentimes - not under my advice; in fact every time I have seen this in some cases folks just kind of went around me and didn't even tell me they were doing this - file a Writ of Mandamus. In other cases, I wasn't the Attorney of Record at the time that I was dealing with the case, but then I later saw the aftermath of the Writ of Mandamus. The point I am trying to make is there seems to be sort of a prevailing mindset if you will within the bureaucracy that there's a normal way of doing things. So when you disrupt that normal way of doing things, that can have ramifications down the road in latter parts of the process. As a result, I've actually seen cases that okay they got Mandamused out of dealing with Department of Homeland Security but now they get over to the Department of State and for some inexplicable reason it seems like it's moving slower. Now I can't prove that there's any type, and I don't exactly think there's any type of collusion against the underlying petition, but what I am saying is there is kind of mindset within the bureaucracy that these things move at a certain pace and those that are trying to sort of buck the trend will sort of be evened out down the road; it sort of all comes out in the wash. I've seen some evidence to suggest that if nothing else, the system if you will seems to kind of create that scenario. 

So the thing I would take away from this video is yes they are absolutely are scenarios where a Writ of Mandamus is required and that is where you are falling sort of grossly out of line with what anyone would reasonably consider a normal processing time but again you have to remember where you may get the upper hand in terms of timing on the front end of something, you may end up stuck in a quagmire on the back end.