I-485 Lawsuit: Two USCIS Green Card Policies Challenged in Court, Still in Effect for Now

If your I-485 is still pending, you've probably seen messages in your group chats over the past couple of days like "Someone sued USCIS" or "The new rule on getting a green card inside the US is about to be blocked."

The short answer first: a lawsuit really was filed on October 5, but the court hasn't decided anything yet, and both policies are still being applied. Your situation today is the same as it was on October 4.

The lawsuit targets two documents USCIS issued this year. One is a May 21 memo that tells officers to treat "applying inside the US instead of going home for consular processing" as a negative factor. The other is an August 5 policy alert that lets officers deny an application with missing evidence without first sending a Request for Evidence (RFE). We hadn't covered the second one on its own before, so this article covers both.

01 Who sued whom, and in which court?

• Court: U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (in Boston), case number 1:26-cv-14527, filed October 5, 2026. The case is American Association of University Professors v. Mullin (complaint, 71 pages).
• Plaintiffs: the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and its Harvard and Boston University chapters; the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and two of its locals; Americans for Immigrant Justice, a Miami-based immigrant legal services group; and 6 individuals who are applying for green cards.
• Defendants: Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow.

The complaint tells the stories of several plaintiffs, which show how these two policies are being used in real cases. One plaintiff, a Nigerian national, works as a Senior Analyst at Comcast; the complaint says that if he is forced to go abroad for consular processing, visa restrictions may keep him from coming back. Another plaintiff was found statutorily eligible for adjustment of status by USCIS but was still denied as a matter of discretion (complaint, paragraph 73). Two other plaintiffs say they were asked at their interviews why they didn't go home to apply. These are the plaintiffs' accounts; the court has not yet examined them.

02 The first document: May's "discretion memo"

The document number is PM-602-0199, issued May 21, 2026 (original). Our September piece on I-485 transfers to field offices and second interviews went through all six pages; here we only cover the parts that matter for the lawsuit.

The memo says that in categories where consular processing is available, an applicant's failure to depart and decision to adjust status inside the US instead are adverse factors that may need to be offset by "unusual or even outstanding equities," and that the absence of adverse factors, by itself, is not enough.

What about H-1B and L-1? The memo also says that dual intent categories are an exception, and that applying for adjustment of status is not inconsistent with maintaining H-1B status at the same time. However, a footnote adds that simply maintaining lawful status in a dual intent category is not sufficient, on its own, for an officer to approve.

The plaintiffs read it more harshly. They argue that the memo in effect requires most applicants inside the US to leave first or risk denial, even though the adjustment of status system Congress wrote into Section 245 of the Immigration and Nationality Act has never required that.

03 The second document: August's RFE policy

This is the one a lot of people missed. The document number is PA-2026-05, issued August 5, 2026, titled "Evidence, Requests for Evidence, and Notices of Intent to Deny" (original). It revises Volume 1, Part E, Chapters 6, 9 and 10 of the USCIS Policy Manual and covers most immigration applications (asylum and refugee cases follow different rules), including the I-485.

In plain terms, it changes these things:

1. An application with missing evidence can be denied outright. Under the old policy, if required evidence was missing, the officer would generally first send an RFE (Request for Evidence) or a NOID (Notice of Intent to Deny) and give you a chance to fix it. Now the officer can choose either to send an RFE or to deny.
2. The RFE deadline is no longer 12 weeks by default. The regulation says the response period can never be more than 12 weeks, and officers used to give the full amount. Now they can give less.
3. Notices mailed abroad no longer get an extra 14 days. You only get the extra 3 days for mailing that the regulation allows, no matter where you are.
4. A partial response counts as a request for a decision. If you send back only part of the requested evidence, USCIS treats your response as complete and decides the case.

The key point is when it applies: it took effect immediately on August 5 and applies to applications that were already pending. In other words, an I-485 you filed before that date is also handled under the new policy.

Put the two documents together and you have the plaintiffs' core argument: people who filed before May had no way of knowing that adjusting inside the US would count against them, so their files naturally include nothing to offset it; then the August policy lets officers deny them without asking first. In the complaint's words, the Policies "change the rules twice for pending adjustment applicants" (paragraph 84).