This afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case of thousands of potential young immigrants and their U.S. family members in the class action lawsuit Mayorkas v. Cuellar de Osorio. The Supreme Court will then determine the true interpretation of The Child Status Protection Act (CSPA) and whether or not it should accommodate young immigrants who age out of the U.S. visa process because of the broken U.S. immigration system and its ridiculously long visa backlog.
What happens when a child waiting for a family-based visa “ages out?”
The Child Status Protection Act (CSPA) was passed in 2002 to deal with growing complications in processing family-based visas. As the U.S. visa backlog grew worse and wait times turned into decades for some visa categories, the federal government needed to address the fact that some child applicants weren’t going to be eligible to get their visa until well into adulthood.
Rosalina Cuellar de Osorio (the plaintiff whose name is on the lawsuit) applied for a visa in 1998 so that she could join her mother in the United States. At the time, Rosalina’s son was a young teenager, so she filed a petition for him to join her in the U.S. as her dependent. When Rosalina was finally granted her visa in 2005, her son had already passed the 21 year age limit for child dependents and he could not get a visa to join his mother.
For U.S. immigration purposes, you are a “child” until you are married or until you turn 21, whichever comes first. Once you turn 21, you no longer qualify for several family-sponsored visas. This includes children who are applying as dependents of other visa applicants. Previously, once these children hit 21, they would lose their place in the (very long) visa line and start to wait all over again in their new, adult category. CSPA was intended to take care of these child applicants by letting them keep their place in line while automatically transferring them to their adult category when they turned 21. However, it did not account for the delays caused by the massive visa backlog, so therefore it is still possible to “age out” of the immigration process.
Possible outcomes of the Mayorkas v. Cuellar de Osorio case
Since the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in 1965, U.S. immigration policy focuses on family unity, ensuring a support system for U.S. immigrants who make the decision to move here permanently. CSPA has not managed to accomplish this goal, nor does it take care of child applicants from before 2002.
Like many other immigration laws passed in the last few decades, CSPA is basically a band-aid that doesn’t fully address the issue of qualified child applicants being left behind while their parent or sponsor was allowed to immigrate. The Senate-passed immigration reform bill already has a provision in it that would take care of the CSPA issue once and for all, but with just a few days left for Congress in 2013, it doesn’t look like that bill is turning into law anytime soon.
Especially with immigration reform stalled, this could be a huge win for U.S. immigrants and an important step forward in U.S. immigration policy We’re hopeful that the Supreme Court ruling will be in the favor of uniting families who have taken the time to complete the family-based visa process and are waiting for the U.S. government to deliver what it has promised.