New York immigration attorney Mona Shah and her law firm, now Mona Shah & Partners, have asked a federal judge to sanction the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Their motion, filed September 16, argues the agency sued them in 2023 without evidence for its claim.
Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires that factual claims in signed court filings have evidentiary support. It is the basis of the motion, which asks the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to dismiss the SEC’s claim against Shah and her firm.
According to Law360, the motion seeks at least US$900,000 in fees and costs. Per that account, the filing describes the firm as “not a large financial institution capable of absorbing an SEC investigation as a cost of doing business.” Courts have adjudicated only nine such motions against the SEC in the past decade, according to her lawyers.
The claim
The SEC sued eight defendants in November 2023, including New York businessman Nadim Ahmed and his Queens-based companies NuRide Transportation Group and NYC Green Transportation Group. Together, they raised more than US$66 million from over 100 investors in the EB-5 program, the complaint says.
Only Ahmed, NuRide, and NYC Green face fraud claims. Against Shah and her firm, then Mona Shah & Associates, the SEC pleads one claim: Selling unregistered securities under Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933. That provision does not require proof of intent.
The complaint cites a Regulation D exemption that requires that every purchaser be an accredited investor. Accredited status generally requires a net worth above US$1 million, excluding a primary residence, or annual income above US$200,000, or US$300,000 with a spouse. As quoted in the complaint, the definition also covers any investor whom the issuer “reasonably believes” meets those thresholds.
According to the SEC, “for each of the NuRide EB-5 Offerings, at least one investor’s eligibility form indicated that the investor was not accredited.” Shah’s press release says the charge “rests on one allegation.” The complaint also alleges that Shah and her firm promoted the offerings and reviewed investors’ eligibility questionnaires.
Sworn testimony
Four months before filing suit, the SEC took Shah’s testimony under oath, according to the motion. She described the investor files her firm kept, including tax returns, bank statements, source-of-funds memoranda, and subscription agreements, and told the agency where they were.
A follow-up SEC subpoena, served three days later, sought the firm’s internal policies and a document checklist but not the investor files, the motion states. Shah maintains that she “told them exactly what we kept on every investor and where those files were.” Nobody, she says, “ever asked to see them, even after that testimony.”
More than two years after suing, in December 2025, the SEC answered requests for admission from Shah’s side, according to the motion. Whether the investors qualified as accredited, it said, “remains the subject of discovery.” The agency added that it had “not received sufficient supporting documents” to resolve the question.
Shah’s side produced more than 72,000 pages of investor records in January 2026, records the SEC had not requested, per the motion. Rule 11 then required that her lawyers serve the motion on the SEC first, giving the agency 21 days to withdraw or correct the challenged filing.
On September 10, the SEC served amended responses converting its earlier answers into denials, the press release states. Her attorneys argue the amendment “confirms that the SEC did not have the necessary evidence to support the claims in its original lawsuit.”
ICAN Law
The Investor Choice Advocates Network (ICAN Law), a nonprofit litigation group, recently joined McGuireWoods as Shah’s co-counsel. Its founder and president, Nicolas Morgan, is a former SEC trial counsel.
Rule 11, in Morgan’s view, exists “so that plaintiffs, including a federal agency plaintiff, cannot accuse someone first and look for the evidence afterward.” Morgan argues that the commission “was told under oath where these records were” but “did not ask for them, and filed the lawsuit anyway.” Her lawyers, he says, are asking the court “to say plainly that the rule applies to the government too.”
Investor petitions
Shah calls the SEC charge “unfair” and says it “has been devastating to my firm and to the hundreds of investors who trusted the EB-5 system.” She says that before the complaint, “approvals were awarded in more than 74 NuRide cases.” Every denial, she adds, “came after the complaint was filed, and the notices cite the SEC case.”
Before the SEC sued, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had sent multiple NYC Green investors notices of intent to deny, according to the 2023 complaint. Those notices concerned petitions for unconditional permanent residency and cited, among other issues, NuRide’s role in NYC Green’s business. USCIS had not approved any NYC Green investor for that status, the complaint adds.
Europe contrast
Regional center offerings, Shah says, “are under the SEC as they are considered security documents,” which is why “an EB5 investor must be accredited.” In her view, the agency “has famously always disliked the EB5 program.”
Europe offers no equivalent, she argues: “There is no SEC in any of the European cases, even in Portugal or Italy.” Portugal’s securities regulator, the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM), does supervise the funds that qualify for its golden visa.
Investors in these projects have suffered for years, in her account. “The SEC,” she says, “does not care how they hurt investors.” For her, the treatment of those investors is one more reason an applicant might pass on the US.
Case history
Both sets of defendants moved to dismiss the complaint in January 2024, and briefing closed that April. According to Shah, the court has not yet ruled on those motions. Her side has requested oral argument on the new motion.
In March 2025, Judge Vernon S. Broderick granted federal prosecutors’ request to intervene and pause discovery for three months while a parallel criminal case against Ahmed was pending. The defendants did not oppose the stay, and the SEC took no position, according to the court’s order.
Prosecutors did not charge Shah in that case. Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave dismissed the criminal complaint against Ahmed without prejudice on January 14, 2026, at the government’s request. That same day, the court had scheduled a hearing to review Ahmed’s compliance with a deferred prosecution agreement, the docket shows.
In a 2023 statement, Shah tied the complaint to a rushed investigation based on incomplete information. Similar arguments now anchor the Rule 11 motion.
Policy backdrop
Her legal team, in comments Shah shared with IMI, argues that the SEC “wants accredited investor reform” and yet “prosecutes cases like this.” She facilitated what the team calls “the exact kind of private capital infrastructure the SEC now says it wants to expand.”
Published in July under Chair Paul Atkins, the SEC’s 2026 regulatory agenda includes possible changes to the accredited investor definition, according to law firm Cleary Gottlieb. An agenda listing is not a formal rule proposal. Shah’s case dates from November 2023, when the SEC filed it under then-Chair Gary Gensler.
