USCIS recently announced that it will be re-balancing the workload distribution of certain Form I-140 petitions and employment based Form I-485 applications. The workload will be distributed between the Texas Service Center and the Nebraska Service Center. Starting October 19, 2015, if you are submitting a Form I-907 together with a Form I-140 petition for […]
The news since last year has been inundated with stories about children crossing the US/Mexico border unaccompanied. This surge, as it has been called, created a need for places to house the children and lawyers to defend them. So how many of those children have actually been allowed to stay in America? And what factors […]
On February 16, 2015, Texas and twenty-six other states filed a case against the expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) and the implementation of Deferred Action for Parents of Citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents (“DAPA”). DACA was originally created in 2012 and allowed immigration officials on a case-by-case basis to refrain from removing […]
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has already approved the statutory maximum of 10,000 petitions for U-1 Nonimmigrant Status (U-Visas) for the 2015 fiscal year that began on October 1, 2014. The cap was reached almost immediately due to the applicants who were on the wait list from the 2014 fiscal year. Unfortunately, this means […]
Due to the recent surge of unaccompanied children migrants the backlog in Immigration Courts has reached an all-time high. At the end of June the back log totaled 375,503 cases, which is an increase of more than 50,000 since the start of the 2013 fiscal year. Specifically the number of juvenile cases has increased to […]
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Program is an Obama Administration initiative implemented to extend rights and benefits to the growing number of undocumented youths and young adults living in the United States. The program allows youths and young adults meeting certain requirements to temporarily defer deportation and receive both eligibility for renewable two-year work […]
In Aldana-Ramos v. Holder, just issued on June 27, 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held that family alone can constitute a particular social group, and thus an asylee who has been persecuted on account of his or her family membership can qualify for asylum. In Aldana-Ramos v. Holder, the […]
In her May 19, 2014 article in Politico titled “States Take on Immigration,” Seung Min Kim explains that states are increasingly taking immigration into their own hands. However, where states used to pass laws focusing on immigration law enforcement such as Arizona’s anti-immigration laws partially struck down in 2010, now they are focusing on expanding […]
The American Immigration Council recently issued a special entitled, “Mexican and Central American Asylum and Credible Fear Claims: Background and Context.” This timely report discusses the current rhetoric surrounding the credible fear process and the state of the U.S. asylum system. Specifically, the report examines the legitimacy of credible fear claims based on situations of […]
In Ramirez v. Dougherty, the district court for the Western District of Washington, in the Ninth Circuit, held that there was a path to citizenship for an alien from El Salvador who entered the U.S. without having been inspected and admitted or paroled, thus illegally in 1999. The plaintiff had lived in the U.S. for […]
