On February 8, USCIS posted a notification regarding the delay in processing of approximately 36,000 immediate relative petitions (that would be for American citizens filing for their spouse, their parents, or their minor children) that were transferred from the California Service Center to the Texas Service Center, ironically because USCIS thought that Texas could process them faster. In fact, the opposite happened and so, in that February 8 notification, USCIS advised that some cases were transferred back to the California Service Center to take advantage of currently available resources.
The following update is provided as of February 14, 2011, and reflects the number of cases in this group that have been processed to date by the Texas Service Center and the California Service Center.
Approved: 10,264
Denied: 55
Request for Evidence/Intent to Deny: 4137
Referred to District Office for Interview: 408
If you have filed a family petition that has been delayed, or if in fact if you have filed any type of immigration application that is currently pending, you can monitor the progress of your case by accessing My Case Status online on the USCIS official website at www.uscis.gov. If you do not see any action on your case, such as an approval, denial or an RFE, by March 1, 2011 you should contact a legal representative to make a formal inquiry with USCIS. Please note that you also have the option of contacting your Senator and/or Congressperson in your district. These offices usually have an immigration congressional liaison who can intercede on your behalf and find out what happened to your case and in many cases, obtain your approval notice without further delay.
Friday, February 18, 2011
State Dept. warning against travel in Mexico
After months if not years of news about the escalating violence in Mexico by drug cartels, which caused the temporary closings of American consulates there several times already, we now have an official warning by the U.S. Department of State against travel in Mexico. This latest step was taken after the killing of a U.S. federal agent by a drug gang on the Texas-Mexico border.
Travel warnings are issued when long-term, protracted conditions that make a country dangerous or unstable lead the State Department to recommend that Americans avoid or consider the risk of travel to that country. A Travel Warning is also issued when the U.S. Government's ability to assist American citizens is constrained due to the closure of an embassy or consulate or because of a drawdown of its staff. It has recently issued a travel warning against Egypt, on February 6, 2011, in the wake of unrest in the Middle-East. The latest travel warning against iran was issued in 2010.The Department of State make periodical reviews and issuance of warnings which can easily be found on its website here.
Travel warnings are issued when long-term, protracted conditions that make a country dangerous or unstable lead the State Department to recommend that Americans avoid or consider the risk of travel to that country. A Travel Warning is also issued when the U.S. Government's ability to assist American citizens is constrained due to the closure of an embassy or consulate or because of a drawdown of its staff. It has recently issued a travel warning against Egypt, on February 6, 2011, in the wake of unrest in the Middle-East. The latest travel warning against iran was issued in 2010.The Department of State make periodical reviews and issuance of warnings which can easily be found on its website here.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Immigration Backlog at Record High
The figures are astounding! According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a non-partisan research organization from Syracuse University, the backlog of immigration cases pending before the Immigration Courts throughout the country is 44% higher than it was in 2008.
The average time these cases had been pending, TRAC said, was 467 days.
California led states with the longest wait time – 639 days, followed by Massachusetts with 615 and Nebraska with 511 days.
Among the countries with the most people involved in Immigration Court cases, people from Armenia had the longest wait – 886, nearly twice the national average of 467 days, the report said.
Other nationalities that waited the longest were Indonesians, Albanians, Iranians and Pakistanis.
This could be in part due to the delay in processing all the background checks, something over which neither the applicant nor the Department of Homeland Security have any power. But it is also a sign of the budgetary crisis faced by the federal government since, clearly, there needs to be additional Immigration Judges, court staff and Department of Homeland Security attorneys hired to deal with this mass of cases.
How many times did I show up in court, ready to present my client's case,and the case was continued, either due to lack of background check, or DHS counsel having misplaced the file, or an interpreter not being available, or the Judge simply having a boatload of cases that took priority because they were pending for even longer than my client's? And of course let's not forget the unscrupulous individuals, attorney and non-attorney alike who have abused the system so egregiously by submitting forged documents, resulting in an entire ethnic group being placed under suspicion because of the actions of a few, and therefore more delay while the government attempts to examine the validity of every documentation submitted by the applicant in their out of state forensics lab, or through certification at the American consulates abroad.
I remember around 2002 the Board of Immigration Appeals underwent major restructuring, with many of the Judges being fired, and the processing of the cases expedited due to a new one member vs three member panel decision making process. But swift justice is not always adequate justice.
What happened is that temporarily, the BIA was able to clear some backlog by basically rubber stamping denials on complex cases that demanded more analysis and these simply ended up being remanded back fromt he Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because the decisions simply failed to articulate or demonstrate if the legal and factual factors were properly evaluated.
And that is for the people who were able to afford legal representation to take them all the way to the Ninth Circuit. For those who didn't, it simply reaffirmed in them the notion that justice is not for the poor! This was a really sad situation as we are not talking about contractual disputes between multi-million dollar companies but the life and death issues of largely indigent families with small children who had survived the most terrifying acts of physical and mental abuse in their home countries.
So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. What is the better of two awful scenarios? An extreme delay in adjudication that basically places a family's survival options in limbo for several years or the kind of swift justice that unfortunately more often than not destroys that same family's chance of survival?
You can read more about TRAC's backlog study in this article here.
The average time these cases had been pending, TRAC said, was 467 days.
California led states with the longest wait time – 639 days, followed by Massachusetts with 615 and Nebraska with 511 days.
Among the countries with the most people involved in Immigration Court cases, people from Armenia had the longest wait – 886, nearly twice the national average of 467 days, the report said.
Other nationalities that waited the longest were Indonesians, Albanians, Iranians and Pakistanis.
This could be in part due to the delay in processing all the background checks, something over which neither the applicant nor the Department of Homeland Security have any power. But it is also a sign of the budgetary crisis faced by the federal government since, clearly, there needs to be additional Immigration Judges, court staff and Department of Homeland Security attorneys hired to deal with this mass of cases.
How many times did I show up in court, ready to present my client's case,and the case was continued, either due to lack of background check, or DHS counsel having misplaced the file, or an interpreter not being available, or the Judge simply having a boatload of cases that took priority because they were pending for even longer than my client's? And of course let's not forget the unscrupulous individuals, attorney and non-attorney alike who have abused the system so egregiously by submitting forged documents, resulting in an entire ethnic group being placed under suspicion because of the actions of a few, and therefore more delay while the government attempts to examine the validity of every documentation submitted by the applicant in their out of state forensics lab, or through certification at the American consulates abroad.
I remember around 2002 the Board of Immigration Appeals underwent major restructuring, with many of the Judges being fired, and the processing of the cases expedited due to a new one member vs three member panel decision making process. But swift justice is not always adequate justice.
What happened is that temporarily, the BIA was able to clear some backlog by basically rubber stamping denials on complex cases that demanded more analysis and these simply ended up being remanded back fromt he Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because the decisions simply failed to articulate or demonstrate if the legal and factual factors were properly evaluated.
And that is for the people who were able to afford legal representation to take them all the way to the Ninth Circuit. For those who didn't, it simply reaffirmed in them the notion that justice is not for the poor! This was a really sad situation as we are not talking about contractual disputes between multi-million dollar companies but the life and death issues of largely indigent families with small children who had survived the most terrifying acts of physical and mental abuse in their home countries.
So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. What is the better of two awful scenarios? An extreme delay in adjudication that basically places a family's survival options in limbo for several years or the kind of swift justice that unfortunately more often than not destroys that same family's chance of survival?
You can read more about TRAC's backlog study in this article here.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Searchable blog of new immigration cases
Jacqueline Brown Scott, a San Francisco based immigration attorney, has a wonderful blog of the newest immigration cases in the Ninth Circuit and BIA, both published and unpublished. The search engine allows you to find the latest cases on the particular topic you are looking for, which is extremely useful for small, sole practitioners (as most immigration attorneys are) who cannot afford expensive legal search programs. She also links to some very informative blogs and websites all on the topic of immigration law. Thank you Jacqueline!
Jacqueline's blog, "New Immigration Cases" can be found here. Her law firm's official website can be found here.
Jacqueline's blog, "New Immigration Cases" can be found here. Her law firm's official website can be found here.
New: Work Permit and Travel Document now combined
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced last week that it is now issuing employment and travel authorization on a single card for certain applicants filing for adjustment of status (Green Card). This is an improvement because of the delay in obtaining a travel document in the past, which meant that the applicants were stuck here or else were deemed to abandon their entire application (along with the non refundable filing fees, which cost to about a thousand dollars) if they decided to leave the US without their travel document in hand. By contrast, the work permit card was usually issued pretty quickly, probably within 45 days of the application, if there were no documents lacking in the application and the results of the applicant's background check were favorable.
The new card actually looks exactly like the work permit card, except for the fine print on the card that reads "Serves as I-512 Advance Parole." This seemingly does not apply to other types of travel documents (at least not yet), like the refugee travel document, or the re-entry permit (for Green Card holders who have some kind of emergency out of the country for which they know they must remain outside for more than 6 months).
More on this can be found on the USCIS official website here.
The new card actually looks exactly like the work permit card, except for the fine print on the card that reads "Serves as I-512 Advance Parole." This seemingly does not apply to other types of travel documents (at least not yet), like the refugee travel document, or the re-entry permit (for Green Card holders who have some kind of emergency out of the country for which they know they must remain outside for more than 6 months).
More on this can be found on the USCIS official website here.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Court revives lawsuit involving corrupt INS Officer
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently reinstated a portion of a lawsuit seeking to hold the federal government responsible for the conduct of an asylum officer who asked two Chinese women applying for asylum in the United States for sex and money in exchange for a favorable resolution of their cases. The officer was arrested, charged and convicted after one of the women, in cooperation with the Justice Department, wore a wire to her meeting with the officer, who sexually molested her and asked for $2000 bribe to approve her case. The officer later committed suicide in jail (the article from metnews merely says he died, but another article from the Daily Journal specifies it was a suicide). The facts of this story and the ensuing civil lawsuit are absolutely incredible. You can read the metnews article in its entirety here. The Ninth Circuit decision can be found here.
Monday, September 6, 2010
FBI uncovers largest human trafficking operation in US
CNN reports that 6 California-based job recruiters have been indicted in federal court for what basically amounts to importing slaves from Thailand by falsely promising them jobs under the H2 visa program. Not only were these unscrupulous individuals planning to detain these Thai workers and make them work for free but in some cases even demanded that they pay additional money to them or they would have them arrested. The FBI says this is the largest human trafficking ring they have uncovered to date in the United States. More on this story here.
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