Epistemic status: two cases and the statute behind them. The first case rests on one side's account in a lawyer's call-in video; I have not seen her file. I am not a lawyer. I could not find a base rate.
AI use: a Codex session did the research: pulled the video captions, found the Policy Manual section and the Turfah opinion plus related cases, and summed the fiscal year 2025 totals from USCIS's spreadsheet. Claude then fact-checked every claim against the primary sources, proofread, and wrote the footnotes. The text and the opinions are mine.
Bureaucracy is a complex and well-oiled machine. But the individual parts of it are still humans, who make mistakes. I stumbled upon this video, which I found an interesting example of this.[1]It is a conversation between an immigration attorney and a Canadian woman. She married an American citizen and applied for a green card because of that. However, for religious reasons she didn't want to get a tetanus shot. This was already surprising to me - I didn't know there was a religious exception to vaccination when immigrating to the US.[2]Her adviser at the time (not the attorney in the call, and not an attorney at all) told her that in order to achieve this she should apply as normal, without proof of vaccination. USCIS would then send her an RFE (request for evidence) for the vaccination proof, and she would submit a special form requesting the religious exception. It is unclear whether this would have worked at all, because USCIS only grants the religious exception if you refuse all vaccines, i.e. you cannot pick and choose, and in the call it sounded like she didn't want the tetanus one specifically.[3]It is also not explained why it was done this way; apparently one can just include this form in the original application.[4]According to the story, USCIS just approved the application without the RFE, the vaccination or the religious waiver. The adviser told the lady that this was the discretion of the immigration officer, but apparently this was just a mistake. Then, years later, the lady tries to naturalize (obtain US citizenship), which requires more scrutiny from USCIS,[5]and during the interview they discover that her green card was unlawfully obtained, since she never completed this requirement, and that she shouldn't have received the green card in the first place. They deny the application.[6]
This denial is in agreement with the law as it is read. INA §318 / 8 U.S.C. §1429 requires that the applicant was "lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence in accordance with all applicable provisions" of the immigration law. The statute itself says nothing about mistakes; the reading that a mistaken approval is not a lawful one comes from the Board of Immigration Appeals and the courts that deferred to it,[7]and USCIS has written it into its Policy Manual. USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 12, Part D, Chapter 2, section A.5, titled "U.S. Government Error", explicitly says that one is not eligible for naturalization
"if his or her LPR status was obtained in error, even in the absence of fraud or willful misrepresentation."
(LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e. a green card holder.)[8]
I find this surprising, because effectively this says "when a system has an error, it is the applicant's problem". In Turfah v. United States Citizenship & Immigration Services, which upheld such a denial and which I will consider below (it is a different case from the video above), the court called Turfah's circumstances "certainly sympathetic" and conceded that the result "could be considered unfair", but held that it was "constrained" to follow the regulation.[9]
I wasn't able to find a well-defined remedy for this woman's case. Even if she were somehow able to provide the vaccination or the religious exception now, there is still the question of her original residence date, which defines when she will be able to naturalize.[10]
I found Kamal Turfah's case from 2017.[11]In 1995, Turfah entered the US on an immigrant visa which depended on his father's immigration. The requirement of the visa was to accompany his father or enter afterwards. However, Turfah entered 24 days before his father and was admitted nevertheless. In 2012, after 17 years, Turfah applied for citizenship, which USCIS denied because Turfah had entered the US before his father, violating the visa requirements. In January 2017 the Sixth Circuit court upheld the decision. The district court (Judge Battani) had proposed a remedy: Turfah applying for a new adjustment of status, which USCIS could at its discretion approve retroactively (this was just a suggestion). According to Judge Boggs's concurrence, "there is no explicit mechanism for an immigrant who already has LPR status to petition for an adjustment so as to be deemed 'lawfully admitted'", and he added the irony that filing the adjustment application (Form I-485) "would possibly require at least a momentary determination that Turfah does not presently have LPR status".[12]
It is natural to view USCIS negatively in light of these cases. However, these seem to be rare exceptions. In fiscal year 2025 USCIS completed about 11 million cases, including about 984,000 naturalization applications, of which about 86,000 were denied for any reason.[13]Obviously there are no stats on the number of denials due to government mistake. Based on the number of described cases online it looks negligible compared to the total, though this is weak evidence: almost nobody litigates a naturalization denial, so most such cases would leave no public trace. Obviously, for the person affected by such a denial, it is a huge problem.
"USCIS Says My Green Card Was Issued by Mistake. What Happens with My Naturalization?", Hacking Immigration Law, LLC, Immigration Answers Show, uploaded 5 May 2026, 19 minutes. The host is attorney Jim Hacking. The caller's account is the only source for her facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyD_-I1ABog
INA 212(g)(2)(C), 8 U.S.C. 1182(g)(2)(C): the vaccination requirement may be waived where it "would be contrary to the alien's religious beliefs or moral convictions". The form is I-601 (Application for Waiver of Grounds of Inadmissibility). Tetanus is on the statutory list of required vaccines in 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(1)(A)(ii). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182
USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 9, Part D, Chapter 3, section E.2: "The applicant must be opposed to all vaccinations in any form", the objection "must be based on religious beliefs or moral convictions" and "must be sincere"; "the applicant cannot 'pick and choose' between the vaccinations." https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-9-part-d-chapter-3 . In the video she says (00:33) "I was not wanting to get my tetanus shot because I felt, you know, a religious conviction against that", and names no other vaccine.
USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 8, Part B, Chapter 12: applicants "must file a waiver application either along with their Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status (Form I-485) and Report of Immigration Medical Examination and Vaccination Record (Form I-693) or in response to a Request for Evidence." https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-b-chapter-12
USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 12, Part D, Chapter 2, section D: "During a naturalization proceeding, the officer must verify the underlying immigrant visa petition ... or other basis for immigrating that formed the basis of the adjustment of status", and "USCIS may find that the applicant was not lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence." Section A.1: the lawful-admission requirement "applies to the applicant's initial admission as a lawful permanent resident (LPR) or adjustment to LPR status." https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-d-chapter-2
Timeline from the video: green card approved in 2021 (00:23); naturalization interview in early 2026, where the officer asked at the end whether she had ever filed the waiver she had said she would file (04:03); denial dated 6 April 2026 (05:55), with no notice of intent to deny beforehand (03:25). She says she asked at the time of the approval, "Is this a mistake?", and was told "No, it was the discretion of the officer" (01:11).
Turfah v. USCIS, 845 F.3d 668 (6th Cir. 2017), slip opinion pp. 4-5: "Every circuit court to consider the lawful-admission requirement has deferred to the BIA's interpretation in Koloamatangi", under which "an alien is not lawfully admitted if he gains LPR status due to a mistake by the government", even without fraud. https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/17a0001p-06.pdf
The same section lists as an example "USCIS incorrectly approved the applicant's adjustment application" and closes with "The applicant is generally ineligible for naturalization under such circumstances, even if he or she did not commit any fraud". The "generally" is real: section E of the same chapter, "Applicants Considered Lawfully Admitted", lists the errors USCIS does forgive. They are clerical: a visa number not requested or allocated when one was available, a wrong class-of-admission code, and an unpaid INA 245(i) "statutory sum", which may be paid during naturalization if it is the sole problem. Nothing medical. https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-d-chapter-2
Turfah, p. 9: "Turfah's circumstances are certainly sympathetic. As Turfah puts it, he is being denied naturalization 'based on a technicality.' This result could be considered unfair, but we are constrained to follow 22 C.F.R. § 40.1(a)(2) and affirm the district court's ruling". The court also defended the rule (p. 8): the accompanying requirement "is not necessarily 'absurd.' One can easily imagine the chaos that would result from allowing a minor child to immigrate months, or even days, before his or her parents", and held that federal courts have no equitable power to confer citizenship (p. 9, citing INS v. Pangilinan).
The attorney in the video does propose a route (07:16-09:40): request a hearing on the denial (Form N-336) before the 30-day deadline, use it to get in front of a supervisor, and ask USCIS to reopen the original green card case so she can file a new medical. He is explicit about the price: "My punishment is I'm going to get a new green card with a new start date and I'm going to have to wait 3 to 5 years to apply for citizenship again" (07:36), and he rates reopening an approved application without that leverage as "almost impossible" (08:09). Two other lawyers told her to go through removal proceedings and re-apply for a green card in front of the immigration judge, at an estimated $10,000-15,000 (10:53, 13:51). Note also what the denial does not do: it does not cancel her green card. Rescinding permanent residence is a separate proceeding, and 8 U.S.C. 1256(a) allows it only "within five years after the status of a person has been otherwise adjusted" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1256). The Turfah court (pp. 8-9) held that the window closing "simply means that the government cannot institute recission proceedings ... not that Turfah's entry was lawful in the first place". So she is left with a green card that is good enough to live on and not good enough to naturalize from.
Turfah v. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, No. 16-1282, 845 F.3d 668 (6th Cir., decided 6 January 2017), opinion by Judge Gilman, concurrence by Judge Boggs, affirming the Eastern District of Michigan (Judge Battani, 2016). Facts from the opinion (p. 2): Turfah, then 19, arrived on 23 September 1995 on a visa for a child "accompanying or following to join" his father; "the immigration authorities mistakenly admitted Turfah"; his father arrived on 17 October 1995 and later became a citizen; Turfah applied for naturalization in November 2012. USCIS originally also denied on a second ground, good moral character over his 2010 taxes, and later dropped it. https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/17a0001p-06.pdf
Turfah, pp. 9-12. The majority wrote only: "we encourage the government to use any discretion that it might have to overcome the current impasse on Turfah's road to naturalization" (p. 9). The retroactive wording is the district court's, quoted by Judge Boggs (p. 11): the government "may decide whether it is appropriate to issue this status nunc pro tunc, or retroactively." Boggs's own concurrence (pp. 10-12) adds the quotes in the text and ends: "I would therefore encourage USCIS to use any discretion it has in processing a Form I-485, should Turfah choose to file one" (p. 12).
USCIS, "Number of Service-wide Forms by Quarter, Form Status, and Processing Time", fiscal year 2025 Q4 workbook, sheet FY25Q4_All_Forms, fiscal-year-to-date columns. Fiscal year 2025 runs 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. All forms: 11,037,994 completions (9,573,826 approved, 1,142,491 denied; receipts 12,981,570). N-400 naturalization applications including the military row: 983,616 completions, 898,050 approved, 85,566 denied, a denial rate of 8.7%. The workbook has no breakdown of denial reasons. https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/quarterly_all_forms_fy2025_q4_v1.xlsx . Even USCIS's internal records may not answer the question: a 2022 study of FOIA-obtained N-400 data (2.69 million decisions, October 2014 to March 2018) found that "over 20% of denials in our analytic sample are missing on adjudication reason" and that "denial reasons are not reliably and systematically captured" (Ryo and Humphrey, PNAS 2022, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8892311/).
Claude thinks the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would invalidate the rule requiring objections to all vaccines and may help her, although it didn't find a case.
Epistemic status: two cases and the statute behind them. The first case rests on one side's account in a lawyer's call-in video; I have not seen her file. I am not a lawyer. I could not find a base rate.
AI use: a Codex session did the research: pulled the video captions, found the Policy Manual section and the Turfah opinion plus related cases, and summed the fiscal year 2025 totals from USCIS's spreadsheet. Claude then fact-checked every claim against the primary sources, proofread, and wrote the footnotes. The text and the opinions are mine.
Bureaucracy is a complex and well-oiled machine. But the individual parts of it are still humans, who make mistakes. I stumbled upon this video, which I found an interesting example of this.[1]It is a conversation between an immigration attorney and a Canadian woman. She married an American citizen and applied for a green card because of that. However, for religious reasons she didn't want to get a tetanus shot. This was already surprising to me - I didn't know there was a religious exception to vaccination when immigrating to the US.[2]Her adviser at the time (not the attorney in the call, and not an attorney at all) told her that in order to achieve this she should apply as normal, without proof of vaccination. USCIS would then send her an RFE (request for evidence) for the vaccination proof, and she would submit a special form requesting the religious exception. It is unclear whether this would have worked at all, because USCIS only grants the religious exception if you refuse all vaccines, i.e. you cannot pick and choose, and in the call it sounded like she didn't want the tetanus one specifically.[3]It is also not explained why it was done this way; apparently one can just include this form in the original application.[4]According to the story, USCIS just approved the application without the RFE, the vaccination or the religious waiver. The adviser told the lady that this was the discretion of the immigration officer, but apparently this was just a mistake. Then, years later, the lady tries to naturalize (obtain US citizenship), which requires more scrutiny from USCIS,[5]and during the interview they discover that her green card was unlawfully obtained, since she never completed this requirement, and that she shouldn't have received the green card in the first place. They deny the application.[6]
This denial is in agreement with the law as it is read. INA §318 / 8 U.S.C. §1429 requires that the applicant was "lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence in accordance with all applicable provisions" of the immigration law. The statute itself says nothing about mistakes; the reading that a mistaken approval is not a lawful one comes from the Board of Immigration Appeals and the courts that deferred to it,[7]and USCIS has written it into its Policy Manual. USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 12, Part D, Chapter 2, section A.5, titled "U.S. Government Error", explicitly says that one is not eligible for naturalization
(LPR is lawful permanent resident, i.e. a green card holder.)[8]
I find this surprising, because effectively this says "when a system has an error, it is the applicant's problem". In Turfah v. United States Citizenship & Immigration Services, which upheld such a denial and which I will consider below (it is a different case from the video above), the court called Turfah's circumstances "certainly sympathetic" and conceded that the result "could be considered unfair", but held that it was "constrained" to follow the regulation.[9]
I wasn't able to find a well-defined remedy for this woman's case. Even if she were somehow able to provide the vaccination or the religious exception now, there is still the question of her original residence date, which defines when she will be able to naturalize.[10]
I found Kamal Turfah's case from 2017.[11]In 1995, Turfah entered the US on an immigrant visa which depended on his father's immigration. The requirement of the visa was to accompany his father or enter afterwards. However, Turfah entered 24 days before his father and was admitted nevertheless. In 2012, after 17 years, Turfah applied for citizenship, which USCIS denied because Turfah had entered the US before his father, violating the visa requirements. In January 2017 the Sixth Circuit court upheld the decision. The district court (Judge Battani) had proposed a remedy: Turfah applying for a new adjustment of status, which USCIS could at its discretion approve retroactively (this was just a suggestion). According to Judge Boggs's concurrence, "there is no explicit mechanism for an immigrant who already has LPR status to petition for an adjustment so as to be deemed 'lawfully admitted'", and he added the irony that filing the adjustment application (Form I-485) "would possibly require at least a momentary determination that Turfah does not presently have LPR status".[12]
It is natural to view USCIS negatively in light of these cases. However, these seem to be rare exceptions. In fiscal year 2025 USCIS completed about 11 million cases, including about 984,000 naturalization applications, of which about 86,000 were denied for any reason.[13]Obviously there are no stats on the number of denials due to government mistake. Based on the number of described cases online it looks negligible compared to the total, though this is weak evidence: almost nobody litigates a naturalization denial, so most such cases would leave no public trace. Obviously, for the person affected by such a denial, it is a huge problem.
"USCIS Says My Green Card Was Issued by Mistake. What Happens with My Naturalization?", Hacking Immigration Law, LLC, Immigration Answers Show, uploaded 5 May 2026, 19 minutes. The host is attorney Jim Hacking. The caller's account is the only source for her facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyD_-I1ABog
INA 212(g)(2)(C), 8 U.S.C. 1182(g)(2)(C): the vaccination requirement may be waived where it "would be contrary to the alien's religious beliefs or moral convictions". The form is I-601 (Application for Waiver of Grounds of Inadmissibility). Tetanus is on the statutory list of required vaccines in 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(1)(A)(ii). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182
USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 9, Part D, Chapter 3, section E.2: "The applicant must be opposed to all vaccinations in any form", the objection "must be based on religious beliefs or moral convictions" and "must be sincere"; "the applicant cannot 'pick and choose' between the vaccinations." https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-9-part-d-chapter-3 . In the video she says (00:33) "I was not wanting to get my tetanus shot because I felt, you know, a religious conviction against that", and names no other vaccine.
USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 8, Part B, Chapter 12: applicants "must file a waiver application either along with their Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status (Form I-485) and Report of Immigration Medical Examination and Vaccination Record (Form I-693) or in response to a Request for Evidence." https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-b-chapter-12
USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 12, Part D, Chapter 2, section D: "During a naturalization proceeding, the officer must verify the underlying immigrant visa petition ... or other basis for immigrating that formed the basis of the adjustment of status", and "USCIS may find that the applicant was not lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence." Section A.1: the lawful-admission requirement "applies to the applicant's initial admission as a lawful permanent resident (LPR) or adjustment to LPR status." https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-d-chapter-2
Timeline from the video: green card approved in 2021 (00:23); naturalization interview in early 2026, where the officer asked at the end whether she had ever filed the waiver she had said she would file (04:03); denial dated 6 April 2026 (05:55), with no notice of intent to deny beforehand (03:25). She says she asked at the time of the approval, "Is this a mistake?", and was told "No, it was the discretion of the officer" (01:11).
Turfah v. USCIS, 845 F.3d 668 (6th Cir. 2017), slip opinion pp. 4-5: "Every circuit court to consider the lawful-admission requirement has deferred to the BIA's interpretation in Koloamatangi", under which "an alien is not lawfully admitted if he gains LPR status due to a mistake by the government", even without fraud. https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/17a0001p-06.pdf
The same section lists as an example "USCIS incorrectly approved the applicant's adjustment application" and closes with "The applicant is generally ineligible for naturalization under such circumstances, even if he or she did not commit any fraud". The "generally" is real: section E of the same chapter, "Applicants Considered Lawfully Admitted", lists the errors USCIS does forgive. They are clerical: a visa number not requested or allocated when one was available, a wrong class-of-admission code, and an unpaid INA 245(i) "statutory sum", which may be paid during naturalization if it is the sole problem. Nothing medical. https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-d-chapter-2
Turfah, p. 9: "Turfah's circumstances are certainly sympathetic. As Turfah puts it, he is being denied naturalization 'based on a technicality.' This result could be considered unfair, but we are constrained to follow 22 C.F.R. § 40.1(a)(2) and affirm the district court's ruling". The court also defended the rule (p. 8): the accompanying requirement "is not necessarily 'absurd.' One can easily imagine the chaos that would result from allowing a minor child to immigrate months, or even days, before his or her parents", and held that federal courts have no equitable power to confer citizenship (p. 9, citing INS v. Pangilinan).
The attorney in the video does propose a route (07:16-09:40): request a hearing on the denial (Form N-336) before the 30-day deadline, use it to get in front of a supervisor, and ask USCIS to reopen the original green card case so she can file a new medical. He is explicit about the price: "My punishment is I'm going to get a new green card with a new start date and I'm going to have to wait 3 to 5 years to apply for citizenship again" (07:36), and he rates reopening an approved application without that leverage as "almost impossible" (08:09). Two other lawyers told her to go through removal proceedings and re-apply for a green card in front of the immigration judge, at an estimated $10,000-15,000 (10:53, 13:51). Note also what the denial does not do: it does not cancel her green card. Rescinding permanent residence is a separate proceeding, and 8 U.S.C. 1256(a) allows it only "within five years after the status of a person has been otherwise adjusted" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1256). The Turfah court (pp. 8-9) held that the window closing "simply means that the government cannot institute recission proceedings ... not that Turfah's entry was lawful in the first place". So she is left with a green card that is good enough to live on and not good enough to naturalize from.
Turfah v. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, No. 16-1282, 845 F.3d 668 (6th Cir., decided 6 January 2017), opinion by Judge Gilman, concurrence by Judge Boggs, affirming the Eastern District of Michigan (Judge Battani, 2016). Facts from the opinion (p. 2): Turfah, then 19, arrived on 23 September 1995 on a visa for a child "accompanying or following to join" his father; "the immigration authorities mistakenly admitted Turfah"; his father arrived on 17 October 1995 and later became a citizen; Turfah applied for naturalization in November 2012. USCIS originally also denied on a second ground, good moral character over his 2010 taxes, and later dropped it. https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/17a0001p-06.pdf
Turfah, pp. 9-12. The majority wrote only: "we encourage the government to use any discretion that it might have to overcome the current impasse on Turfah's road to naturalization" (p. 9). The retroactive wording is the district court's, quoted by Judge Boggs (p. 11): the government "may decide whether it is appropriate to issue this status nunc pro tunc, or retroactively." Boggs's own concurrence (pp. 10-12) adds the quotes in the text and ends: "I would therefore encourage USCIS to use any discretion it has in processing a Form I-485, should Turfah choose to file one" (p. 12).
USCIS, "Number of Service-wide Forms by Quarter, Form Status, and Processing Time", fiscal year 2025 Q4 workbook, sheet FY25Q4_All_Forms, fiscal-year-to-date columns. Fiscal year 2025 runs 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. All forms: 11,037,994 completions (9,573,826 approved, 1,142,491 denied; receipts 12,981,570). N-400 naturalization applications including the military row: 983,616 completions, 898,050 approved, 85,566 denied, a denial rate of 8.7%. The workbook has no breakdown of denial reasons. https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/quarterly_all_forms_fy2025_q4_v1.xlsx . Even USCIS's internal records may not answer the question: a 2022 study of FOIA-obtained N-400 data (2.69 million decisions, October 2014 to March 2018) found that "over 20% of denials in our analytic sample are missing on adjudication reason" and that "denial reasons are not reliably and systematically captured" (Ryo and Humphrey, PNAS 2022, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8892311/).