The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has addressed the seemingly conflicting evidentiary standards laid out by USCIS in a 2007 memo - which requires an I-130 petitioner who has been convicted of certain crimes against children to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is not a danger to the non-citizen beneficiary - and the decision in Matter of Chawathe, which holds that petitioner must only prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the petition should be granted. “ In other words, the issue before us is whether 8 U.S.C. § 1154(a)(1)(A)(viii)(I), in granting USCIS ‘sole and unreviewable discretion’ to ‘determine[] that the citizen poses no risk,’ also affords the agency discretion to depart from its own binding regulations or precedents in making this determination. We hold that it does not.”
“While Congress has granted USCIS unreviewable discretion to determine whether a citizen petitioner poses no risk to the Form I-130 beneficiary, USCIS has not provided ‘clear and convincing evidence of congressional intent to preclude judicial review’ over its decision to exert this discretion in a manner that violates its own binding regulations and published precedents. As the Supreme Court has explained, Congress may shield from judicial review an agency’s ultimate determination without precluding courts from reviewing the ‘practice[s] or procedure[s] employed in making’ such individual determinations.”
“It is possible that Chawathe does not apply in the AWA context and that, in making its preponderance-of-the-evidence standard precedential, the Department did not mean to disturb the beyond-any-reasonable doubt standard that may have already been in place for no-risk determinations under the AWA. But because the District Court did not address this possibility, and because the Government does not make this argument before us, we cannot conclude that the agency has not violated its own binding precedent. Nothing in the Act required the agency to adopt any particular standard. But if there was a standard in place, then the agency was required to follow it.”
The full text of Castaneira v. Noem can be found here: https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/05/23-5204-2118185.pdf