A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has cleared the way for a Russian student to sue Secretary of State Marco Rubio over a stalled visa application, rejecting the government’s attempt to toss the case out of court.
In a decision handed down on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that the State Department cannot simply rely on “boilerplate” legal arguments to ignore a student who has been stuck in administrative limbo for nearly a year.
The legal battle began with Timofey Sluev, who applied for an F-1 non-immigrant visa to start graduate school in the United States.
After an interview at the U.S. Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan, back in June 2024, a consular officer told Sluev he needed “additional administrative processing.”
Sluev was asked to turn over his CV and a list of his publications. Even though he submitted the paperwork just two days later, his application sat untouched for nine months. The silence from the embassy forced Sluev to postpone his education multiple times, leading him to file a lawsuit to force the government to make a decision.
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Lawyers for Secretary Rubio and the State Department moved to dismiss the case, arguing that recent court precedents hold that consular officers have no real duty to act on applications held in this kind of processing. They also argued that the “doctrine of consular nonreviewability”—a legal rule that usually prevents judges from second-guessing visa denials—shielded them from the lawsuit entirely.
Judge Mehta didn’t buy it. He pointed out that while a previous case, Karimova v. Abate, limited certain claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, it didn’t give the government a free pass to ignore all other laws.
The judge noted that Sluev pointed to specific regulations, like 22 C.F.R. § 41.121(c), which suggests that reviews of certain visa refusals “may be deferred for not more than 120 days” when an applicant is submitting new evidence.
The court found that the government failed to address these specific legal arguments until it was too late in the briefing process. Judge Mehta also stood by previous rulings in the District, stating that “inaction on a visa application stuck in administrative processing” is not shielded from a judge’s oversight.
By denying the motion to dismiss, the court has signaled that the State Department must do more than provide “familiar boilerplate” excuses when a student’s future is put on indefinite hold.
The case, Sluev v. Rubio, will now move forward, potentially forcing the government to finally give the graduate student a “yes” or “no” answer.
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