Your case is stuck.
Make them decide.

It is a lawsuit in federal court asking a judge to order USCIS to make a decision on your case. It does not ask the court to approve you, and a court will not do that. It ends the indefinite wait. In practice agencies often finish the case shortly after being sued.

Once we have your documents, drafting, filing and service usually take a week or two. After service the government has 60 days to respond, and a good number of cases are decided inside that window. We track every deadline for you.

You will not be denied for suing. A mandamus case is about the failure to decide — it is procedural, and it is not aimed at any individual officer. The officer deciding your case applies the same facts and the same law either way. This is an ordinary remedy for unreasonable delay, used often, and in practice it does not earn applicants worse treatment: what it does is move your file from the queue onto someone's desk. To be plain about it, what it produces is a decision, not an approval. Before you sign, the attorney handling your case will go through the trade-offs for your specific situation.

It mostly turns on one question: has the delay become unreasonable — meaning you have waited longer than the processing time USCIS publishes, or past 12 months. Either one is enough. We also suggest chasing it administratively first: file a case inquiry, or ask your member of Congress's office to make one. Neither is a legal prerequisite, and courts generally will not turn you away for skipping them; but it sometimes moves the case on its own, and it creates a record that the agency had its chance. The 60-second check above compares the Received Date on your receipt notice against the published times. Whether you can actually file is decided by the attorney who reviews your documents before you sign.

Naturalisation has its own statute, more direct than ordinary mandamus: if there is still no decision 120 days after your interview, you can go to the federal district court where you live. What makes this route unusual is that the court can decide the naturalisation application itself, or send it back to USCIS with instructions. The 120 days run from the interview date, not from when you filed.

You can, with a caveat worth saying up front: consular cases are harder than domestic ones. The government routinely argues consular nonreviewability. So the relief we ask for is that the consulate make a decision, not that it issue the visa — that distinction is the whole case. In practice we look at these once the wait is past about six months. Whether it is worth it, the attorney will tell you straight, including when the answer is no.

Yes, and you should, because they are free: file a case inquiry on the USCIS site, ask your member of Congress's office to look into it, or go to the CIS Ombudsman. Sometimes that is enough on its own. Mandamus is what you use when those have been tried and the case still has not moved — and courts do look at whether you tried, which is why the first thing we ask at intake is which of them you have done.

Legally yes, but we would not advise it. A mandamus case follows the federal rules, turns on which court has venue, and is judged against the six TRAC factors courts use to weigh whether a delay is unreasonable. A procedural mistake usually means refiling — months gone, and the few hundred dollars in filing fees with them. This is precisely why we do only mandamus: file in the right court, and answer the government's usual grounds for dismissal before they are raised.

No lawyer who follows the rules guarantees an outcome, and we will not either. What we offer is a consistent record, a process that has been done many times, and an honest assessment at the start — if we think mandamus is wrong for you, we will say so.

There are no other costs. The flat $3,500 covers the whole of it: intake, documents, venue analysis, drafting, filing in federal court, certified-mail service and tracking throughout, and attorney fees, the court's filing fee and service costs are included. Nothing is triggered, nothing is billed by the hour.

Yes. File together and once both of you have signed, each takes $200 off — $3,300 each. You can also start on your own and get the reduction refunded later if someone joins.

Yes. Your documents, including sensitive details like your A-number, are encrypted in transit and at rest, access is controlled, and they are covered by attorney confidentiality.