SIJS Deferred Class Action Lawsuit
On July 17, 2025 the National Immigration Project, along with partners, filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of SIJS youth across the country, Centro Legal de La Raza and CARECEN-NY, challenging the federal government’s termination of the SIJS Deferred Action Policy. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
The National Immigration Project, the organizational home of the End SIJS Backlog Coalition, stands in solidarity with all SIJS youth through this lawsuit.
End SIJS Backlog Coalition Director, Rachel Davidson, and Steering Committee Member, Rebecca Scholtz, are part of the National Immigration Project’s co-counsel team for this lawsuit.
Read our press release about the lawsuit here.
About the lawsuit:
A.C.R. et al. v. Noem et al., No.1:25-cv-3962, is a proposed nationwide class action filed by nine immigrant youth and two legal services providers in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York challenging the federal government’s decision to end the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) Deferred Action Policy. The SIJS Deferred Action Policy provided protection from deportation and the ability to apply for work permits to young people who have already been approved for SIJS by USCIS and who are on a legal path to permanent residency but face years-long delays due to visa backlogs.
The lawsuit—brought by the National Immigration Project, Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), Public Counsel, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, and Lowenstein Sandler LLP—seeks to reinstate this policy, which has protected approximately 200,000 immigrant youth who have survived parental maltreatment and whom a state court has determined should not be returned to their countries of origin. The complaint argues that the government violated the Administrative Procedure Act by ending the policy without proper notice or justification, leaving thousands of immigrant youth in legal limbo and at risk of deportation.
For more information and updates about the lawsuit, see the National Immigration Project’s case page here.
Coalition members file lawsuit against USCIS for data on SIJS
On August 18, 2021, The Door and Professor Laila L. Hlass, Coalition members, filed a lawsuit against the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) seeking expedited processing of a Freedom of Information Act request for agency data on Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) adjudications and applications. The suit, filed by Milbank LLP on behalf of plaintiffs not-for profit The Door and Tulane Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic Co-Director, Laila Hlass, as part of the broader End SIJS Backlog Coalition, follows USCIS’ failure to comply with the plaintiffs’ April 2021 FOIA request for data that is necessary to examine trends in the treatment of immigrant children under the SIJS statute, a matter of urgent importance affecting the well-being of tens of thousands of vulnerable immigrant youths.
Since the filing of the lawsuit, through settlement negotiations, USCIS has provided the Coalition with some of the requested data on the SIJS backlog and SIJS adjudications. This data is reflected in the Coalition’s first report “Any Day They Could Deport Me” and in our new report, “False Hopes”. It is also published and analyzed in great detail in the article “The Double Exclusion of Immigrant Youth” published in the Georgetown Law Journal by Laila L. Hlass, Rachel L. Davidson and Austin Kocher.