Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (“SIJS”) is a form of humanitarian immigration relief that provides a pathway to lawful permanent residence for children in the United States who are unable to be reunited with one or both of their parents due to abuse, abandonment, neglect, or a similar basis under state law. Despite the significance of this humanitarian form of relief, there are only a few hundred state family and juvenile court cases involving requests for state court orders containing SIJS judicial determinations that are publicly available. This article was developed to inform state court judges of the settled law surrounding SIJS and the judicial determinations that state court orders must contain as a prerequisite before SIJS-eligible children can file petitions for immigration relief under the SIJS program.
Based on the SIJS case law review, there are a significant number of cases in which the state court’s opinions contained legally incorrect information about SIJS that is not supported by the current SIJS statutes and regulations. Legally incorrect information was applied in state court opinions that both granted and denied SIJS judicial determinations to SIJS-eligible children. Therefore, the difficulties state courts experienced in correctly applying federal SIJS immigration laws was and is understandable in light of the SIJS law’s statutory and regulatory history.
The SIJS statute has been significantly amended several times over the years in 1994, 1998, 2005, and 2008. However, regulations implementing all of these statutory changes were not issued until 2022. As a result, this article’s review of SIJS case law highlighted numerous instances where state courts issued decisions citing SIJS statutes and/or regulations that are incorrect and/or outdated today, and also those that were no longer legally correct at the time the state court orders were issued. Although the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued policies implementing statutory amendments made between 1994 and 2008 on March 24, 2009, the SIJS regulations were not updated until March 8, 2022. This greatly exacerbated state courts’ difficulty in understanding SIJS federal immigration laws. USCIS inadvertently added to this confusion when it technically “updated” the SIJS regulations in 2009; however, those were technical amendments that failed to actually implement the 1994 – 2008 statutory amendments Congress made to the federal immigration laws governing SIJS. To help alleviate misinformation about SIJS laws, USICS continues to provide additional clarification about SIJS through its policy manual, brochures, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and other up-to-date materials.