Multinational Managers in Limbo: EB-1C Holds and the Multi-Plaintiff Suit

An L-1A multinational manager from one of the restricted countries called the Immigration Answer Show on June 7 with a case structure that has become familiar in the law-firm intake queues of 2026. His employer filed his Form I-140 petition under the EB-1C category for multinational managers and executives in November 2025, paid the premium processing fee, and elected not to file the I-485 concurrently — a routine cost management decision that, under the agency’s posture at the time, looked unremarkable. Seven months later, the petition has not been adjudicated. The L-1A status is weeks from its statutory seven-year ceiling. The employer has filed an I-129 extension and an I-539 for the spouse, seeking the final six-month recapture available before the L-1A maxes out under 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(l)(12).

The caller’s question was practical and time-sensitive: should he add the nonimmigrant filings to the multi-plaintiff federal lawsuit his attorneys had already filed on behalf of the stalled I-140.

The host’s answer captured the litigation strategy the firm has been pursuing across more than two hundred plaintiffs in the District of Massachusetts.

The reasoning is structural. USCIS has two parallel adjudication tracks that affect the same applicant: the immigrant petition that will ultimately produce the green card, and the nonimmigrant extension that keeps him lawfully employed in the interim. If the agency moves on the nonimmigrant filing first, the L-1A is extended and the immediate work authorization problem is solved — but the I-140 hold remains, and the underlying immigrant path stays frozen. If the agency moves on the I-140 first, the petitioner may be eligible to file a concurrent or follow-on I-485 and to obtain employment authorization and travel documents as an adjustment applicant — but only if his nonimmigrant status has not lapsed in the interim. Adding both tracks to a single mandamus action keeps the agency on the clock for whichever filing matures first.

The petitions held under the country-based adjudication pauses are not limited to family-based cases. USCIS guidance issued in late 2025 directed officers to slow or suspend processing of immigration benefits for nationals of expanded travel-restriction countries — a list whose public scope has shifted between 39 and a larger group of nations the administration has variously identified for “enhanced vetting.” Employment-based I-140 petitions filed by U.S. employers on behalf of beneficiaries from those countries have, in many cases, been swept into the same hold posture even where the underlying job offer and qualifications are uncontested.

The Rhode Island district court’s June 5 ruling in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS vacated four of the USCIS directives underlying the family-side holds, including the Benefits Hold Policy that froze adjustment of status and work permit processing for nationals of the listed countries. The ruling, issued under the vacatur authority in 5 U.S.C. § 706(2), applies nationwide on its face. What it does not specifically reach is the parallel hold pattern affecting employment-based I-140 adjudications — which the firm pursuing the multi-plaintiff action has framed as a distinct administrative-law violation requiring its own remedy.

The District of Massachusetts complaint is being assembled around the same APA theory: the agency has imposed a de facto country-based hold on a category of benefits that Congress made available without regard to nationality, has done so through internal guidance never published for notice and comment, and has used premium processing fees from the affected petitioners to fund adjudicative capacity it has then declined to deploy.

For petitioners and employers watching the broader pattern, three near-term inflection points matter:

• The premium-processing refund posture. USCIS has not, as of early June, articulated a refund mechanism for premium processing fees paid on EB-1C petitions held past the statutory adjudication window. The multi-plaintiff complaint is expected to seek return of those fees as one component of relief.
• The L-1A clock. Multinational managers approaching the seven-year ceiling under 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(l)(12) cannot extend further once that ceiling is reached. The hold on the I-140 forecloses the customary AC21 portability and concurrent I-485 bridge that would otherwise carry workers across the gap.
• The interplay with the May discretion memo. Even if I-140 petitions begin to clear under court pressure, the PM-602-0199 framework — which directs officers to treat adjustment as extraordinary and to consider consular processing alternatives — will reach the downstream I-485 filings these petitioners will eventually need to file. The two policies stack.

The strategic posture for employers and their employees, the host emphasized, is to keep every filing on the clock — extension, immigrant petition, dependent change of status — and to add each to coordinated litigation as receipts arrive. The agency’s position has been that each adjudication is individually discretionary and individually non-reviewable. The petitioners’ position, increasingly tested in court, is that a coordinated hold pattern producing identical delays across hundreds of cases is itself the reviewable agency action.

For the L-1A executive on the call, the immediate guidance was narrow: forward the new I-129 and I-539 receipts to counsel, add them to the existing complaint, and treat the lawsuit as the umbrella under which all of the family’s pending adjudications move forward. The broader guidance for similarly situated petitioners is the same. The agency may ultimately concede some of these cases; it has rarely done so without a docket number forcing the question.