Musings on Immigration

A lot has happened in the life of Justin Bieber since I blogged about potential immigration consequences of Bieber’s recent run-ins with the law.   First, Bieber was arrested in Canada and charged with assault after allegedly punching a limo driver who would not turn the music up as loud as Bieber wanted it.   Second, Bieber’s plane was stopped and searched coming into the U.S. from Canada on Super Bowl weekend, and Bieber was detained for questioning by customs.   Third, more than 240,000 people signed a petition on the White House’s webpage asking that Bieber be deported from the United States. What does this all mean for Bieber’s immigration status?   With regard to the assault charge Bieber is facing, if he is ultimately convicted of simple assault his immigration status would not be affected as long as Bieber is not sentenced to more than 12 months confinement.   If I had to guess, I would say it is more likely that one of Bieber’s cronies will take the ...

A couple of years ago, I was contacted by a Pakistani American who was trying to get an immigrant visa for an orphaned baby. The baby had been found outside in the freezing cold in January of 2012 in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Only God knows how she survived. After the baby came home to California, the same client sent me an article from the Dawn Newspaper. According to the article, over 10,000 newborns were found dead in trashcans across the country in 2012.  Think about that: 10,000 newborns- most of them little girls.  I could have gotten orphan visas for most of those babies. In fact, I’m pretty confident I could have gotten a visa for every single one of them. Yet only 29 visas were issued to Pakistani orphans in 2012. According to State Department Statistics international adoptions in general fell to 8,668 in 2012 after peaking at 22,884 in 2004. Of the almost 9,000 visas issued to foreign orphans last year, less than 200 of those visas were issued to orphans from pr...

What happens when one government agency (Customs and Border Protection or "CBP") changes how an essential form is generated and subsequently used by another government agency (USCIS), without telling them in advance to be prepared?  Some would say "hilarity ensued."  The rest of us would say "ARGHHHHHHH!"   What is even worse about this change April 2013, was that the new electronic system used by CBP to issue the Form I-94 is remarkably unforgiving, highly technical, and frequently unable to actually generate the Form I-94 needed to verify the Form I-9, obtain a social security number, or obtain a drivers license. CBP had a very good reason to stop issuing the paper Form I-94--it was expensive (around $17 million a year), and it was no longer necessary from THEIR perspective, in that with the machine readable passports they were accepting they had all of the information they needed capture already electronically in t...

“Imagine if Congress mandated that an arbitrary number of jail cells be filled with prisoners—regardless of the crime rate. Authorities would be required to incarcerate people, no matter the circumstances or the affront to human rights. That’s basically the state of immigration detention in the U.S.” -The Editors of  Bloomberg View , September 26, 2013              Right now there are thousands of non-violent individuals who are being detained by ICE in private detention facilities. These numbers include the undocumented as well as the documented that the U.S. government is trying to remove from the United States. They are detained not as a result of an individualized review of the case to determine the security risk they pose to the community, but because Congress has mandated that ICE maintain a constant detention population of 34,000. Congress did not create this mandate legislatively by altering the statutory schem...

The term “broken immigration system” seems to have become a catchphrase in the discourse regarding immigration reform.   Politicians all seem to agree that we have a “broken immigration system,” but do they really understand how broken the system really is and the effect it has on law abiding individuals trying to follow the rules to immigrate to the United States?   The answer must be no because if they truly understood how screwed up the system is, and the unjust effect the system has on people, my guess is that partisanship would be set aside and a sensible compromise would be reached just out of a basic sense of humanity.   An example of our backwards and broken system: In the late 80’s and early 90’s civil war was rampant in Central American countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador.   As a result, many people elected to flee to the United States rather than chose sides in the conflict and be forced into war.   People traveled up through Mexico and arr...

Lately, ICE has been moving many individuals picked up at the southern border to Ocilla, Georgia. This means that individuals with families in other states are now forced to request bond in Atlanta, Georgia.   These families often go to attorneys in their states who then file the bond request in Atlanta.   After watching several out-of-town attorney request bond for their recently arrived clients, I have come up with a list of tips: 1. Get Your Evidence Together Judges in Atlanta want to see evidence that a client is not a danger to the community and evidence that he/she is not a flight risk.    You cannot file a Motion for Bond with no evidence and expect that a Judge will grant your Motion.   Relevant evidence is a must! 2. Do Not Assume Your Motion for Telephonic Hearing Will Be Granted We are often called by out-of-town attorneys only one or two days before a bond hearing.   The attorneys are frantic because they have just discovered that their M...

Nadie planea o imagina ser arrestado, asi que se necesita estar preparado si se está indocumentado y de pronto se encuentra bajo arresto por manejar sin licencia o por cualquier otra razón. Sabiendo que este es un riesgo grande al subirse a un automóvil, necesita saber que es lo que puede hacer para prepararse si esto llegara a sucederle.   Es muy poco lo que puede hacerse una vez estando detenido en la cárcel o al ser transladado a una prisión, asi que a continuación encontrará las cinco cosas que le sugeriría hacer ahora, que podrían ayudar a su caso ante la Corte de Inmigración en un futuro: Primero – asegúrese de que usted y los miembros de su familia tengan la información de contacto de un Abogado de Inmigración reputable y de confianza que pueda ser localizado rápidamente –todos los días recibimos llamadas de emergencia y proveemos consultas urgentes porque familiares de una persona detenida deben actuar rápidamente cuando sus familiares son detenidos. No se puede da...