In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 19-2689 MARIA V. DIJAMCO, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CHAD F. WOLF, Acting Secretary of the Department of Home- land Security, et al., Defendants-Appellees. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 1:18-cv-3338 — Sara L. Ellis, Judge. ____________________ SUBMITTED JANUARY 23, 2020 — DECIDED JUNE 26, 2020 ____________________ Before ROVNER, HAMILTON, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge. Maria Dijamco came to the United States from the Philippines and sought lawful status to stay in the country through her mother who had a green card. What followed was a lengthy and tangled process that ultimately proved unsuccessful. Dijamco then filed suit in the district court, contending that the United States Citizenship and Im- migration Service failed to follow its own laws and 2 No. 19-2689 regulations in revoking and refusing to reinstate her petition for a visa. The district court concluded that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction to consider any of Dijamco’s claims. We agree and affirm. I A Recognizing the importance of familial ties, our country’s immigration laws allow citizens and lawful permanent resi- dents to seek permission for their relatives to join them in the United States by filing visa petitions. The United States Citi- zenship and Immigration Service processes all types of re- quests for visas, including those premised on family relation- ships. USCIS’s family-based visa system is complicated, and how it works depends in part on the precise family relation- ship as well as the legal status of the petitioner. What matters for purposes of this appeal is that Maria Dijamco’s mother, a green card holder living in the United States, filed a visa peti- tion on Dijamco’s behalf in 1992. Though the petition received approval, Dijamco still had to wait for a visa to become avail- able, as Congress restricts the number to be granted in a year. The wait can be lengthy. After four years of anticipation in the Philippines, Dijamco still had not received a visa. At that point, she decided to join her mother in the United States an- yway, and she used fraudulent papers to do so. Without fully recounting the twists and turns of Dijamco’s quest for legal status, a few key events are important to this appeal. The first occurred in 2005, when a visa opened up and became available to Dijamco. That development allowed her to try to get a green card based on her pending visa petition. In immigration parlance, Dijamco’s application for a green No. 19-2689 3 card reflected an effort to adjust her status in the United States. See 8 U.S.C. § 1255 (explaining the processes through which noncitizens eligible for visas may seek long-term per- manent residence via “adjustment of status”). The next meaningful event came after USCIS denied Di- jamco’s green card application and while her administrative appeal was pending. It was then that Dijamco’s mother— who, recall, applied for a visa on ...
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