Musings on Immigration

Does My Criminal Record Ever Go Away? I get many questions about whether someone can erase their criminal record after completing probation or after the passage of a certain amount of time. In the United States, your criminal convictions are never automatically taken off your record just due to the passage of time. If you have a conviction from 1999, that conviction will appear on your criminal record the same way in 1999 as in 2015. Nothing changes. You may petition the court to withdraw a guilty plea or file a petition for habeas corpus to vacate your plea. These motions and petitions can be granted if there were constitutional or other issues with your plea. But there are strict time limits for these motion and petitions. A motion to withdraw a guilty plea almost always must be filed within the same "term of court." That could be two months or even one day after your plea. A petition for habeas corpus must be filed within 180 days after a conviction for a traffic offen...

It’s not often we get to witness the inner workings of the American justice system. Unless you’re a judge, attorney, or just someone that has had one too many brushes with law enforcement, most Americans don’t usually get to witness the nitty gritty of our legal practices. On the rare occasions when we do, it seems everyone not only has an opinion, but a strong one (read: Zimmerman, Casey Anthony, OJ Simpson). We debate and react with outrage when we feel our justice system was not quite… just . Sadly it’s usually the cases that are not broadcasted 24/7 on CNN and FOX that tend to fall through the cracks. It’s the impoverished, the youth, the victims of crimes and domestic abuse, the immigrants… those are the ones that are forced to navigate an unfair justice system first hand.  The travesty of justice can only get worse when suffered by the voiceless. As an immigration attorney, we see this first hand with immigrants put in removal proceedings, ...

There has been a lot of talk recently about what might be included in an immigration reform bill. Will there be a legalization/amnesty/forgiveness of “lawbreakers” rule? Will there be an expansion of employment based and family based immigrant visa numbers to solve the economically devastating backlogs we currently deal with? Will there be a mandatory E-Verify component? Will there be an interior enforcement focus? Will there be even more fences? The topic that seems to be lost in all this speculation is something I consider to be the overriding component of reform–the Key to holding a reform package together. I am speaking, of course, of Due Process Restoration. Anyone who deals with immigrants for any length of time is intimately familiar with the disaster that is our immigration enforcement system. It is not just that previous administrations have done a horrific job at the enforcement that should have been taking place, but rather, the missing component to that enforcement. When is...