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Law360 (May 7, 2020, 3:28 PM EDT) -- A health care staffing company has dropped its lawsuit accusing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of taking an unreasonably long time to process over 150 visa petitions for medical workers, saying that the petitions have now been resolved after a year.
Within three months of launching the lawsuit in D.C. federal court, Management Health Systems LLC, which does business as MedPro, announced Wednesday that USCIS has resolved all but one of its H-1B visa requests for a spate of medical laboratory technologists.
"MedPro has thus obtained the relief it sought," it said in a one-page notice to the court.
The voluntary dismissal ends allegations that USCIS and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had put MedPro through an "unreasonable" delay in processing the health care workers' specialty visa applications.
A USCIS spokesperson told Law360 on Thursday that the agency evaluates each H-1B petition on a case-by-case basis. As a matter of practice, USCIS said that it doesn't comment on the review process for specific petitioners.
In its lawsuit, MedPro alleged it had been waiting "311 days and counting" for USCIS to process its H-1B visa petitions for laboratory medical technologists.
The visa applications were first filed in April 2019 and the workers were slated to begin working in the U.S. last fall, but their start dates passed without a visa decision, MedPro said.
The U.S. faces dire shortages in medical laboratory professionals, and MedPro had filed the H-1B visas because it had been unable to recruit enough domestic workers to staff medical labs across the country, according to the complaint.
But MedPro alleged that the delay took on a more serious tone as the U.S. faced its own coronavirus outbreak. The country's "healthcare industry cannot serve its constituency — patients — without an adequate supply of highly skilled and qualified healthcare professionals," MedPro said in its complaint.
There had only been a handful of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. when MedPro first filed its lawsuit in early February. Since then, the number has exploded and surpassed 1.2 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Officials have warned that the flood of coronavirus patients will further strain health care worker shortages as doctors and nurses on the front lines contract the virus. Recently, House Democrats pressed the Trump administration to speed up processing visa applications for health care workers needed to fight the virus's spread.
On April 23, President Donald Trump issued an order temporarily barring green card seekers from entering the U.S. in an attempt to protect domestic workers who lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic. But Trump's order carved out an exception for immigrants looking to work in the U.S. as health care professionals embedded in the country's coronavirus response.
Representatives for MedPro did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
MedPro is represented by Andrew D. Prins and Gregory B. in den Berken of Lathan & Watkins LLP.
The government is represented by Timothy J. Shea and Paul Cirino of the U.S. attorney's office and Daniel F. Van Horn of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.
The case is Management Health Systems LLC v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security et al., case number 1:20-cv-00330, in the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia.
--Additional reporting by Hannah Albarazi, Sarah Martinson and Suzanne Monyak. Editing by Abbie Sarfo.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
