Opinion ID: 2744070
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Inconsistency with Prior Rulings or Precedent

Text: Fogo de Chao raises additional challenges to the legal standard applied by the Appeals Office, all of which are grounded in claims of inconsistency with previous Service decisions or other precedent. We find no merit in those objections on this record. First, Fogo de Chao argues that the denial of a visa in this case was an abrupt and unexplained departure from prior agency practice granting such visas without the culturalknowledge-free evidentiary demand imposed here. Specifically, Fogo de Chao asserts that, from 1997 to 2006, 251 of its previous visa petitions for churrasqueiro chefs were approved. The Department does not dispute that many such petitions were approved, but counters that, during the same time period, more than forty petitions were denied. The Department then, as the Appeals Office did, dismisses any previously approved petitions—to the extent they were factually similar to the Gasparetto petition—as “material and gross error.” J.A. 677. The Department is correct that “[t]he mere fact that the agency, by mistake or oversight, approved” a visa petition “on one occasion does not create an automatic entitlement to the approval of a subsequent petition.” Royal Siam Corp. v. Chertoff, 484 F.3d 139, 148 (1st Cir. 2007). Yet it may be that a pattern of visa grants of sufficient magnitude could obligate the agency to provide a “reasoned explanation for    treating similar situations differently,” ANR Pipeline Co. v. FERC, 71 F.3d 897, 901 (D.C. Cir. 1995)—or at least something more reasoned than confessing a decade-long pattern of “material and gross error.” 31 We need not resolve that question here, however. Although Fogo de Chao asserted that the prior petitions were factually equivalent, it never introduced any evidence corroborating that assertion. Nothing in the administrative record reveals whether even a sampling of those cases involved factually and legally similar contexts. Without such a showing, we cannot conclude that the Department in fact treated “similar situations differently.” ANR Pipeline, 71 F.3d at 901. Fogo de Chao’s detailed efforts to distinguish the denial of an L-1B visa classification to another Brazilian steakhouse chef in Boi Na Braza Atlanta, LLC v. Upchurch, No. 3:04-cv2007-L, 2005 WL 2372846 (N.D. Tex. Sept. 27, 2005), aff’d 194 Fed. App’x 248 (5th Cir. 2006), prove the point. Visa decisions can be fact-intensive, and assessing the evidentiary record behind any such determination is essential to evaluating the reasonableness of the agency’s decision. See IKEA US, Inc. v. Department of Justice, 48 F. Supp. 2d 22, 25 (D.D.C. 1999) (INS did not act arbitrarily and capriciously in failing to distinguish previous visa petition’s approval where the employer failed to submit the file to INS for its consideration), aff’d No. 99-5159, 1999 WL 825420 (D.C. Cir. Sept. 27, 1999). The evidentiary gap is particularly hard to understand given that the prior visa decisions involved Fogo de Chao’s own employees, and so presumably the company had the necessary information at hand. Rather than provide any of that data, Fogo de Chao pointed to two reports as evidence of inconsistent treatment. See Fogo de Chao Opening Br. 46–51, 62–63 (citing DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY OFFICE OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL, REVIEW OF VULNERABILITIES AND POTENTIAL ABUSES OF THE L-1 VISA PROGRAM (Jan. 2006), reproduced at J.A. 496–538; UNITED STATES CITIZENSHIP 32 AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES OMBUDSMAN, ANNUAL REPORT 2010 (June 30, 2010), reproduced at Opening Br. Addendum 163–306). Neither substantiates Fogo de Chao’s claim. To start with, the 2006 report from the Department’s Office of the Inspector General, and in particular the portion focusing on the L-1B visa program, simply discusses in very general terms the 1990 legislative amendment and the Department’s interpretive memoranda. While the report states that the Department has “little room” to tighten the relevant standard administratively, J.A. 506, that simply begs the question of how that standard has been applied across cases over the years. It thus does nothing to document an actual shift in how factually similar petitions have been disposed of either generally or in connection with Fogo de Chao’s churrasqueiros specifically. The 2010 report from the Service’s Ombudsman, for its part, criticizes an earlier Appeals Office decision for casting doubt on the authoritativeness of the Puleo Memorandum. But even assuming that taking issue with an internal agency guidance document could constitute inconsistency in any legally relevant sense, the Appeals Office decision under review neither cites that disapproved ruling nor discounts the Puleo Memorandum. Quite the opposite, the Appeals Office describes the Puleo Memorandum as the “key agency document relating to the adjudication of L-1B specialized knowledge visa petitions,” J.A. 650, and discusses it at length in its analysis, see J.A. 650–651, 653–654, 663, 666. Second, Fogo de Chao argues that the Department’s “narrowly drawn” decision here departs from prior precedent and legislative history that endorse a more expansive interpretation of the “specialized knowledge” standard. That argument suffers from the same flaw as the claim of 33 inconsistent treatment because Fogo de Chao never demonstrates how the actual content of any prior interpretations differed from the Appeals Office’s analysis in a way that is relevant to this case. All agree that the 1990 legislation broadened the “specialized knowledge” definition in two specific respects. It overrode agency precedent requiring that the knowledge or skill be (i) “proprietary” and (ii) “not readily available in the United States.” Compare 8 U.S.C. § 1184(c)(2)(B), with 52 Fed. Reg. at 5752. To the extent that the 1990 Act eliminated those two limitations on “specialized knowledge,” it is true that the standard became “less[]” restrictive than the regulatory definition that immediately preceded it. Puleo Memorandum at 1, J.A. 42. The problem for Fogo de Chao is that being “less” restrictive in two specific respects is fully consistent with remaining a “still high” and exacting standard, Puleo Memorandum at 1, J.A. 42, as long as that standard does not revive the two limitations that Congress displaced and represents a reasonable exercise of regulatory discretion. The legislative history on which Fogo de Chao relies does not help its cause. A House Report stating that the “specialized knowledge” standard was “broadened to accommodate changes in the international arena,” H.R. Rep. No. 723(I), 101st Cong., 2d Sess. 69 (1990), simply raises the question of how much and in what manner the statute was expanded. Worse still for Fogo de Chao, the Report’s list of the changes designed to broaden the program’s reach did not include the amendment of “specialized knowledge.” See id. Instead, the purpose identified for the “specialized knowledge” amendment was simply to provide “more specificity” to the statutory term, addressing a problem that “[v]arying interpretations” by the agency “ha[d] exacerbated.” Id. 34 For that reason, the Service’s citation to pre-1990 precedent does not demonstrate that it applied a standard inconsistent with the new definition, as long as those authorities were applied consistently with superseding congressional direction. See Brazil Quality Stones, Inc. v. Chertoff, 531 F.3d 1063, 1070 n.10 (9th Cir. 2008) (noting in L-1A visa context that reference to pre-1990 precedent was appropriate where the precedent addressed an aspect of the definition of “managerial capacity” unaffected by the 1990 Act). For similar reasons, Fogo de Chao’s argument that the previous visa approvals or unspecified precedent established a “definitive interpretation” of the Service’s regulation that can only be changed through notice-and-comment rulemaking or formal adjudication fails. See Fogo de Chao Opening Br. 50 (quoting Alaska Professional Hunters Ass’n v. FAA, 177 F.3d 1030, 1034 (D.C. Cir. 1999)). Simply identifying outcomes, stripped of their contextual analysis, falls far short of the documented record of “express, direct and uniform interpretation” by the agency required before a fixed legal rule will be discerned. Association of American Railroads v. Department of Transp., 198 F.3d 944, 949 (D.C. Cir. 1999). Moreover, a definitive legal rule cannot be wrung out of a pattern of decisions unless the decisionmaker has “the authority to bind the agency.” Devon Energy Corp. v. Kempthorne, 551 F.3d 1030, 1040 (D.C. Cir. 2008). No such authority has been established here where (i) the service centers that granted Fogo de Chao’s prior petitions lacked the authority to bind the agency; (ii) from all that Fogo de Chao has shown, none of the decisions on which it purports to rely were designated precedential; and (iii) each decision was expressly “based on the facts and circumstances of each individual case.” J.A. 660. 35 In sum, based on the limited showing that Fogo de Chao has made both here and before the Service, it has not met its burden of demonstrating either an unexplained break from past practice or settled law, or unreasoned differentiation in the treatment of similar cases. Of course, to the extent that the “material and gross error” that the agency indicated might be lurking in its prior decisions was the consideration of cultural knowledge, it remains open to the Appeals Office on remand to consider the significance, if any, of that prior pattern of decisionmaking.