The Daily Fuckup

A federal judge in Tampa on July 3 declined to grant emergency temporary restraining-order relief in a case brought by 129 Cuban nationals who say U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has unreasonably delayed action on their green card and work permit applications.

The plaintiffs in Acosta Reynoso v. USCIS say they filed Form I-485 applications under the Cuban Adjustment Act and Form I-765 applications for employment authorization, then waited years for decisions. In their motion, they asked the court to bar USCIS from enforcing several policy memoranda and to order the agency to act on the pending applications. The judge denied the TRO request, saying the plaintiffs had not shown that ex parte relief was warranted, that they were likely to win on the merits, or that they faced irreparable harm.

The order does not end the case. It denies only the temporary restraining order and leaves the request for a preliminary injunction alive. The court directed the defendants to respond to that part of the motion by July 17, 2026.

The opinion also points to the procedural and jurisdictional problems with the plaintiffs’ ask. The judge said the requested TRO would function more like permanent relief than a short-lived status-quo order, and noted that the plaintiffs had not shown why emergency relief without fuller briefing was necessary. The court further said it had reservations about whether the challenged USCIS memoranda amounted to final agency action, and whether the court could review the pace of adjudications at all.

The underlying dispute is about delayed immigration-benefits processing, not detention. The plaintiffs say the wait for action on their applications has left them without lawful permanent resident status and, in some cases, without stable work authorization. For now, though, the July 3 order gives them no immediate court-ordered fix; it only keeps the larger injunction fight moving forward on the docket.