Kazarian v. USCIS

Kazarian v. USCIS refers to a case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on March 4, 2010, pertaining to a decision by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on a Form I-140 EB-1 application. The decision led the USCIS to issue a policy memo (dated December 22, 2010) change its adjudication process for EB-1 and EB-2 petitions to a "two-step review" where the first step would focus on counting pieces of evidence and the second step would be a final merits determination. The case has been cited by USCIS as well as by petitioners in hundreds of Form I-140 petitions and appeals since 2010.

The EB-1 category was introduced as part of the Immigration Act of 1990. Since that time, the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), and later, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have worked to clarify the process for EB-1 petitions. Some key developments prior to the Kazarian case are listed below:

Poghos Kazarian grew up in Armenia. He received a Ph.D in Theoretical Physics from Yerevan State University in Yerevan, Armenia in 1997. From 1997 to 2000, he remained at YSU as a Research Associate, where he specialized in non-Einsteinian theories of gravitation. From 2000 to 2004, he worked as a Physics/Math/Programming Tutor, an Adjunct Physics and Mathematics Instructor, and a Science Lecture Series speaker at Glendale Community College, California, in the United States. He was also a member of a research group at the California Institute of Technology, located close to Glendale Community College, where he worked with American theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. He also authored the self-published textbook Concepts in Physics: Classical Mechanics. He published in journals such as Astrophysics and worked on cosmogony problems posed by Victor Ambartsumian.

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