Josue Fuentes v. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services

Case Overview

Josue Ariel Fuentes and Cristian Ayala Rivas are naturalized U.S. citizens who obtained legal status through the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) program, which protects noncitizen children who were abused, neglected, or abandoned by a parent. Their noncitizen mothers sought lawful status through their children, but USCIS denied the applications under the SIJ statute's exclusion clause, 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(27)(J)(iii)(II), which bars a natural or prior adoptive parent of an SIJ recipient from gaining any immigration benefit by virtue of that parentage. The plaintiffs challenged both USCIS's interpretation of the clause and the clause itself on equal protection grounds. On July 24, 2026, the Fourth Circuit affirmed, holding that the plain text of the exclusion clause supports USCIS's regulation and that the clause survives rational basis review.