The American Immigration Council (AIC) sued on March 11, 2021, in federal court on behalf of seven U.S. employers whose H-1B petitions were rejected. The lawsuit challenges U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) “arbitrary and capricious refusal to accept timely and properly filed H-1B petitions” subject to the annual cap. AIC said USCIS rejected the petitions filed after October 1 “simply because the H-1B worker’s intended employment start date—naturally—also fell after October 1.” Based on this timeline, AIC said, “USCIS created an absurd choice: foreign workers needed to start on October 1 (and not a day later), or the U.S. employer had to misrepresent the intended employment start-date by ‘back-dating’ the petition.” In fact, AIC noted, USCIS had accepted some with an employment start date after October 1 without issue.
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