The District of Connecticut is the smallest mandamus docket of the Second Circuit districts covered here, and it has the most coherent published law. Where S.D.N.Y. split judge by judge over whether these claims are justiciable at all, D. Conn. answered the question early, answered it in the plaintiff's favour, and has not disturbed the answer since. For a Fairfield County petitioner with a genuine choice of forum, that consistency is the whole case for filing here.
Getting the case here: the venue analysis
A civil action against federal officers sued in their official capacity is governed by 28 U.S.C. § 1391(e)(1), which is considerably more generous than the ordinary venue statute. Venue is proper in any judicial district in which:
- § 1391(e)(1)(A) — a defendant resides. For officers sued in an official capacity, residence means the district of the officer's official station. The Secretary of Homeland Security and the Director of USCIS sit in Washington, D.C., which is why so many delay cases can be filed in the District of Columbia regardless of where the plaintiff lives.
- § 1391(e)(1)(B) — a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred. In a delay case the operative omission is the failure to decide, which points at whichever office is actually sitting on the file — a field office, a service center, or a national unit.
- § 1391(e)(1)(C) — the plaintiff resides, so long as no real property is involved in the action. For an individual with a stalled application this is the simplest and most common hook, and it is the one that requires the least pleading.
The three prongs are independent. Satisfying any one of them makes venue proper, and a plaintiff with more than one available prong has a genuine choice of forum — which is where the case law below starts to matter.
D. Conn. covers the entire state from courthouses in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport. The Hartford Field Office supplies the § 1391(e)(1)(B) hook for most Connecticut-adjudicated matters, and the residence prong is straightforward for any Connecticut resident.
The forum-selection question that actually arises here is a Fairfield County one. A petitioner living in Greenwich or Stamford who works in Manhattan may have a colorable residence argument in only one of the two districts but an events-or-omissions argument in the other, depending on which office holds the file. Where both are genuinely available, the case law below is a real reason to prefer D. Conn. over S.D.N.Y.
Pleading venue on the location of the office holding the file can point away from the district you want. Much New York-area work is processed at the Vermont Service Center, which sits in the District of Vermont; the National Benefits Center, the Immigrant Investor Program Office and the National Visa Center all sit elsewhere again. Where several prongs are available, plead the one you actually intend to rely on, and expect the government to test it. The transfer analysis under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) is treated separately in Defending Venue Transfer, and the broader forum-selection question in Choice of Forum.
The governing law in the Second Circuit
There is no “writ” to petition for
Rule 81(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure abolished the writ of mandamus in the district courts; relief is sought instead as an ordinary civil action in the nature of mandamus under 28 U.S.C. § 1361. See In re Nagy, 89 F.3d 115, 116 (2d Cir. 1996). This is not pedantry. In Espin v. Gantner, discussed below, the court opened its jurisdictional analysis by observing that the petitioner “prays for a form of relief abolished over seventy years ago with the promulgation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” Captioning matters.
The three elements
A plaintiff seeking relief in the nature of mandamus must establish:
- a clear and indisputable right to the relief sought — In re Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., 861 F.2d 1307, 1312 (2d Cir. 1988);
- a plainly defined and peremptory duty on the defendant's part to do the act in question — Lovallo v. Froehlke, 468 F.2d 340, 343 (2d Cir. 1972); and
- that no other adequate remedy is available — id.
Relief will not issue to compel a discretionary act. Anderson v. Bowen, 881 F.2d 1, 5 (2d Cir. 1989); Work v. United States ex rel. Rives, 267 U.S. 175, 177 (1925); Heckler v. Ringer, 466 U.S. 602, 616 (1984); Pittston Coal Group v. Sebben, 488 U.S. 105, 121 (1988). The entire fight in a delay case is therefore over characterization: the government says the pending application is a discretionary matter, and the plaintiff answers that the decision may be discretionary but the duty to decide is not.
This is the decision the government cites in almost every Second Circuit delay case, for the sentence that judicial creation of a duty would carry “the potential for mischievous interference with the functioning of already overburdened administrative agencies.” 569 F.2d at 1182. The sentence is real. Its subject is not.
The duty the court declined to create was a duty to conduct and complete a discretionary fraud investigation that a consular officer had requested as a predicate to issuing visas abroad. The Second Circuit was careful to separate that from the agency's duty to act on the preference petitions themselves — a duty it held had already been discharged when the petitions were approved: “The INS's duty in the matter ended there.” The court affirmed dismissal while expressly vacating the district court's contrary statement that the agency had a further duty to investigate.
Wan Shih Hsieh is authority that a discretionary investigative function cannot be compelled. It is not a holding that an agency may leave indefinitely undecided a benefit application it is required to decide. Briefing that does not draw that line concedes the strongest adverse authority in the circuit.
The APA route, and why it usually matters more
Two APA provisions carry the weight. 5 U.S.C. § 555(b) requires that “within a reasonable time, each agency shall proceed to conclude a matter presented to it,” and 5 U.S.C. § 706(1) authorizes a reviewing court to “compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed.” The APA is not itself a grant of jurisdiction — Califano v. Sanders, 430 U.S. 99, 105–07 (1977) — but in combination with the federal-question statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1331, it supplies one.
The six-factor framework for assessing whether a delay is unreasonable comes from In re Telecommunications Research & Action Center v. FCC, 750 F.2d 70, 79–80 (D.C. Cir. 1984). District courts in this circuit apply the TRAC factors, but they arrive from another circuit — a distinction worth preserving when a government brief treats them as though they settled the question. The factors are set out at length in The TRAC Factors, and the choice between the two theories in APA Delay vs. Mandamus.
What D. Conn. has actually held
The district's answer to the jurisdictional question is settled and, unusually, traceable through a single consistent line.
Three plaintiffs had waited over three years for adjudication of concurrently filed I-485s, stalled behind an incomplete FBI name check. The government moved to dismiss under 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii), the provision stripping review of actions “specified … to be in the discretion” of the Attorney General or Secretary. The court denied the motion.
The reasoning is the part worth carrying into a brief. Section 1255(a) makes the decision whether to adjust status discretionary, but it “does not address, much less specify any discretion associated with, the pace of application processing.” The jurisdiction-stripping provision reaches “not … all decisions the Attorney General is entitled to make, but … a narrower category of decisions where Congress has taken the additional step to specify that the sole authority for the action is in the Attorney General's discretion” — quoting Alaka v. Attorney General, 456 F.3d 88, 95 (3d Cir. 2006), and citing Spencer Enterprises v. United States, 345 F.3d 683, 689 (9th Cir. 2003), and Ahmed v. Gonzales, 447 F.3d 433, 436 (5th Cir. 2006). Hence: “while the decision to grant or deny an adjustment application is wholly discretionary, the decision of whether to actually adjudicate an adjustment application … is not discretionary.”
The court noted that the Second Circuit had not spoken to the question directly, and read § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii)'s reference to “this subchapter” per Sanusi v. Gonzales, 445 F.3d 193, 198 (2d Cir. 2006).
Alkeylani did not invent the rule. It rests on Bartolini v. Ashcroft, 226 F. Supp. 2d 350, 353 n.3 (D. Conn. 2002), which stated plainly that “the INS does not have discretion as to whether to adjudicate an adjustment of status application,” and on Koren v. Chertoff, No. 3:07-cv-157, 2007 WL 1431948, at *3–4 (D. Conn. May 14, 2007), which had reached the same conclusion months earlier and supplied the decision/pace distinction Alkeylani adopted.
Koren is unreported and is described here as Alkeylani reports it. Counsel intending to rely on it should obtain the order itself.
The threshold argument the government runs in every delay case — that § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii) bars review — has already been rejected here, in a reasoned published opinion, by a judge of this court, on facts indistinguishable from the ordinary stalled-I-485 case. That is worth more to a plaintiff than a favorable disposition percentage, because it is citable. It is also the sharpest contrast with S.D.N.Y., where the same question produced a decade of conflicting decisions.
The decisions discussed above are this district's published landmarks. They are not a survey of how the district ruled last month, and no honest guide can offer one. The overwhelming majority of USCIS delay cases end without a written opinion — the agency adjudicates after service and the parties file a stipulation of dismissal, or the court disposes of the matter by unpublished order. Those dispositions never enter the reported case law and are not searchable in the free databases.
So the published line tells you how this bench reasons when it does write. What happens in the ordinary case is practice, not precedent, and it is described as such wherever it appears on this page.
Estimated disposition posture
My estimate is that roughly 85% of resolved D. Conn. cases end in voluntary dismissal after USCIS adjudication — the highest rate of any district in the seven-district set. About 8% are dismissed on a government Rule 12 motion, and the total "case-reached-a-judge" rate is approximately 11%. As elsewhere, these are estimates synthesized from secondary sources — see the flagship comparison for methodology.
Strategic considerations
- Cite Alkeylani in the complaint, not just in opposition. Pleading the decision-versus-pace distinction up front, with local authority attached, tends to shorten the exchange considerably.
- Fairfield County petitioners should treat the D. Conn. / S.D.N.Y. choice as a real one. Where both districts are available under § 1391(e), D. Conn. offers a settled answer to the jurisdictional question and S.D.N.Y. offers a split.
- The small bench cuts both ways. Assignment is far less random than in a large district, so familiarity with the assigned judge matters more — and a single adverse ruling would carry disproportionate weight in a district with few published decisions.
- Lead with the APA claim under § 1331, with § 1361 pleaded in the alternative. Alkeylani reached both, but the APA theory is the one its reasoning most directly supports.
- Do not choose this district to make new law. The docket is thin and the written record correspondingly sparse on contested questions such as EB-5 timing or consular nonreviewability.
When D. Conn. is the right choice
D. Conn. is the right forum for petitioners residing anywhere in Connecticut, and a genuinely attractive one for Fairfield County petitioners with venue flexibility. Its advantages are concrete rather than atmospheric: a published decision rejecting the government's principal jurisdictional defense, a consistent bench, and fast calendars.
It is the wrong forum for a case that needs precedent developed on a contested substantive question. The same thin docket that makes routine cases move quickly means the bench has had few occasions to write on anything beyond the threshold issue — and the absence of written law can cut against a plaintiff as easily as for one.
Considering a mandamus petition in District of Connecticut?
Forum choice is part of the analysis from day one. If you have a delayed USCIS application and you want to discuss whether D. Conn. is the right venue — or whether a different district would be stronger — reach out for a no-cost case evaluation.