UJC AND CLEARY GOTTLIEB FOIA LITIGATION OBTAINS DOCUMENTS ON USCIS BLANK SPACES POLICY
Today, the Urban Justice Center’s Domestic Violence Project (DVP) released internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) records revealing the rushed implementation and devastating impact of USCIS’s “no-blanks” policy, which purports to empower USCIS to reject U-visa petitions, among other immigration applications, solely because they contain blank answer fields.... Over the past nine months, USCIS has utilized the no-blanks policy to reject properly-filed U-visa petitions for trivial and nonsensical reasons, such as when the “middle name” field in a U-visa petition is left blank because the crime victim has no middle name.