Two days ago the Brazilian board carried a New York judge striking down the State Department's suspension of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries. Folha has now gone back to the ruling that came before it, and the plaintiff who won it is Brazilian.
Newton de Moura Gomes, a telecoms engineer and former Petrobras employee who built a business in Campos dos Goytacazes, had been investing in the United States since 2010 and was in the final stages of an EB5 application when the consulate general in Rio told him the process had been suspended by order of the State Department. The programme grants a green card to people who put at least 500,000 dollars into a business creating at least ten jobs in a high-unemployment area; the family's money went into a hotel development in Arizona. In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had frozen immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries, Brazil among them, on a public-charge argument — that people from those countries are likely to end up dependent on the state.
He sued, and on 31 July Judge Amit Mehta of the federal district court in Washington held that the policy exceeded Rubio's authority. "Under the Public Charge Policy, the Secretary of State is doing precisely what the INA prohibits: he is controlling individual visa application determinations," Mehta wrote. The law gives that judgement to consular officers, case by case; the policy removed it by requiring refusal on nationality alone. Folha notes that Mehta is himself a naturalised American born in India.
The order is narrow. It bars the department from applying the policy to this one application and requires it to decide that application, with two months to deliver the green card once the consulate finishes. The government did not appeal. A State Department spokesperson told Bloomberg Law that the agency does not comment on ongoing litigation, adding that the administration is upholding the highest standards of screening and vetting.
What made it larger was the citing. When Judge Jeannette Vargas in New York struck down the policy itself weeks later, in a case brought by a Catholic legal immigration network, she quoted the Moura Gomes ruling more than once. The family's lawyers, at the firm Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli and Pratt, describe that as a snowball: one judge decides, and the next is readier to.
Folha also reports what the case cost the family while it sat still. Newton was diagnosed with a rare salivary gland cancer in 2014 and with lung metastasis in 2022, which should have qualified his file for expedited handling. It did not get it.
Why it is on the board
Fourth on Folha's most-read list when we collected — the second instalment of this thread, after the New York ruling we carried on the 26th.
확인: Folha de S.Paulo · Bloomberg Law