November 01, 2022

USCIS Guidance Enabling STEM Graduates to Obtain O-1 Extraordinary Visas Should Apply Equally to EB-1 Extraordinary Petitions for Green Cards

Cyrus D. Mehta & Jessica Paszko*, Nov. 1, 2022 "Earlier this year, the USCIS issued policy  guidance  in the USCIS Policy Manual to clarify how the USCIS evaluates evidence to determine eligibility for O-1A nonimmigrants of extraordinary ability, with a focus on persons in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields. The O-1A nonimmigrant visa is available to persons of extraordinary ability...

October 31, 2022

Afghan Evacuees in Limbo While Seeking Permanent Legal Status in the U.S.

Michelle Hackman, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 29, 2022 "The Biden administration’s calls on Congress to provide all  evacuated Afghans  a path to citizenship—as the government had done after similar evacuations from Vietnam and Iraq—have so far gone unheeded. Bipartisan legislation in Congress, sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and based off the Biden administration’s proposal...

October 28, 2022

Experts Debunk Border Misinformation

Josh Kelety, Associated Press, Oct. 27, 2022 "Several Republican elected officials have suggested in recent social media posts that almost 100 people on the terrorist watchlist have entered the U.S. along the southwest border. “FACT: at least 98 terrorism suspects illegally crossed our border in the last 12 months,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy wrote Saturday on Facebook. “Biden’s open border is a national...

October 27, 2022

Amid Record Venezuelan Arrivals, Biden Administration Embraces Border Expulsions Policy

Muzaffar Chishti and Kathleen Bush-Joseph, MPI, Oct. 27, 2022 "The Biden administration’s announcement of a policy to expel to Mexico some Venezuelans arriving without authorization at the U.S.-Mexico border represents a significant reversal for a president who campaigned against similar approaches by his predecessor. The action is particularly noteworthy given the Biden team’s effort to end the Title 42 expulsions...

October 27, 2022

TPS for 337K at Risk

Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News, Oct. 26, 2022 "Negotiations between the Biden administration and attorneys representing hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in the U.S. under a temporary humanitarian program collapsed this week, paving the way for Trump-era decisions to revoke their legal status to take effect absent court intervention. After more than a year of federal court talks, the Biden administration...

October 26, 2022

DOL Fails to Side with H-1B Worker who Claimed Back Wages Against Employers After Being Terminated

Cyrus D. Mehta and Kaitlyn Box*, Oct. 26, 2022 "H-1B workers can file complaints against employers to the Department of Labor if they are not paid the promised wage. One H-1B worker filed complaints against two of his employers, Metromile, Inc, and Hinge Health, for back wages. When H-1B worker was not satisfied with the initial decisions, he appealed them to an Administrative Law Judge (ALF). The ensuing decisions...

October 26, 2022

Lawyers, Organizations Ask EOIR to Address "No Notice / Docket Reshuffling" Crisis

Letter from National Consortium of Immigration Practitioners- No Notice & Docket Reshuffling, Oct. 25, 2022 "We write this letter as a consortium of over 200 immigration practitioners from across the nation. We are private practitioners, professors, and non-profit advocates who together represent non-citizens in every state of the nation, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. This consortium includes both...

October 21, 2022

Lawmakers Call for Closure of ICE Jail in NM

Phaedra Haywood, Santa Fe New Mexican, Oct. 21, 2022 "U.S. senators from California and Massachusetts have joined New Mexico Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján in calling for the closure of a Torrance County immigration detention center. The lawmakers — including California’s Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, all Democrats — asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement...

October 20, 2022

FEDERAL COURT PRELIMINARILY APPROVES CLASSWIDE SETTLEMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS LAWSUIT CHALLENGING WORKPLACE ICE RAID

NILC, Oct. 19, 2022 "On Oct. 19, a federal judge  preliminarily approved  a class settlement of a lawsuit challenging an April 2018 immigration raid. The settlement provides over $1 million to workers detained as part of the raid, which took place at a meat processing plant in East Tennessee and was, at the time, the largest workplace raid in nearly a decade. The plaintiffs allege that armed U.S. Department of...

October 19, 2022

In Case You Missed It...

Here is a recording of the Oct. 13, 2022 MIRR Alliance webcast on Nativist Extremism:  How did nativist extremists capture the GOP, strangle immigration reform—and what to do about it?  Strong nativist sentiment, once relegated to the ideological fringes, has found a home in the Republican Party. Today, an increasingly acrimonious culture war powered by anti-immigrant posturing and contemporary narratives of fear has...

October 19, 2022

Students, Legal Scholars Push California Universities to Hire Undocumented Students

Miriam Jordan, New York Times, Oct. 19, 2022 "[A] coalition of undocumented student leaders and some of the nation’s top legal scholars is proposing that California, a state that has served as an incubator for progressive policies on immigration, begin employing undocumented students at the 10 University of California campuses. The proposal, which almost certainly would face significant political and legal challenges...

October 18, 2022

Process for Venezuelans (USCIS, Oct. 18, 2022)

USCIS, Oct. 18, 2022 "On Oct. 12, 2022, the United States   announced  a new process that allows Venezuelan nationals and their immediate family members to come to the United States.  This provides a safe and orderly way for nationals of Venezuela who are outside the United States and lack U.S. entry documents to be considered, on a case-by-case basis, for advance authorization to travel and a temporary period...

October 17, 2022

Over 63,000 DHS Cases Thrown Out of Immigration Court This Year Because No NTA Was Filed

TRAC, Oct. 17, 2022 "As of the end of September 2022, Immigration Court judges dismissed a total of 63,586 cases because Department of Homeland Security officials, chiefly Border Patrol agents, are not filing the actual “Notice to Appear” (NTA) with the Immigration Court. Without a filed NTA, the case cannot proceed. This means that one out of every six Court cases were thrown out for this reason this past fiscal...

October 17, 2022

Biden’s Pardons: The First Drops in a Big Bucket of Criminal Reform

Prof. Stacy Caplow, Oct. 17, 2022 "President Biden pardoned thousands of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents who committed or were convicted in federal courts of simple marijuana possession since 1992, and even earlier if those records can be located. This is a record number of mass pardons since Vietnam draft resisters were pardoned by President Carter in 1977.  Predictably, no one is totally...

October 17, 2022

Experts: Let Private Citizens Sponsor Refugees

Janine Prantl, Stephen Yale-Loehr, NY Daily News, Oct. 15, 2022 "Every fall, the U.S. president sets a refugee ceiling — the maximum number of refugees that may be resettled annually to the United States. For the new fiscal year that started Oct. 1, President Biden plans to resettle up to 125,000 refugees. Because of dramatic cuts to the refugee program during the prior administration, that goal will be hard to...

October 17, 2022

CDC Scientist Reconfirms Political Origins of Title 42

Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News, Oct. 17, 2022 "The U.S. government's top public health expert on migration told Congress he refused to approve a policy allowing mass expulsions at the U.S.-Mexico border because he believed the measure, enacted by President Donald Trump and retained by President Joe Biden, unfairly stigmatized migrants as spreaders of COVID-19. During an interview in May with the House Select...

October 14, 2022

Texas Sheriff Certifies Migrants Flown to Martha's Vineyard as Crime Victims

JAMES BARRAGÁN, Texas Tribune, OCT. 13, 2022 "Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar on Thursday certified that 49 migrants who were flown to Martha’s Vineyard by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last month were victims of a crime. The move clears a pathway for those migrants to get a special visa to stay in the country that they otherwise would not have received. Rachel Self, a Massachusetts attorney working with the migrants...

October 14, 2022

Lawsuit Challenges Barriers to Access to Counsel

AIC, Oct. 13, 2022 "Several legal services organizations  filed a lawsuit  today against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for unlawfully preventing attorneys from communicating with immigrants detained in four detention facilities in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Arizona. Plaintiff organizations, represented in the lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); the American Immigration Council;...

October 14, 2022

Company Pays $300K Civil Penalty to Settle Immigration Discrimination Case

DOJ, Oct. 13, 2022 "The Department of Justice today announced that it has secured a settlement agreement with Professional Maintenance Management (PMM), a cleaning and janitorial services company based in Maryland. The settlement resolves the department’s determination that PMM discriminated against its non-U.S. citizen workers when checking their permission to work in the United States, in violation of the Immigration...

October 12, 2022

DHS Announces New Migration Enforcement Process for Venezuelans

DHS, Oct. 12, 2022 "Today, as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing work to build a fair, orderly, and secure immigration system, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is announcing joint actions with Mexico to reduce the number of people arriving at our Southwest border and create a more orderly and safe process for people fleeing the humanitarian and economic crisis in Venezuela. Almost four times...

October 12, 2022

The Texas Border County at the Center of a Dangerous Right-Wing Experiment

Melissa del Bosque, The Intercept, Oct. 12, 2022 "Officials in rural Kinney County, Texas, are pushing Gov. Greg Abbott to take ever more extreme action against migrants and asylum-seekers." Sheriff Brad Coe in his office in Kinney County, Texas, in December 2021. Photo: Melissa del Bosque

October 11, 2022

Amending Lozada?

Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase, Oct. 11, 2022 "In 1984, the Supreme Court in Strickland v. Washington announced the standard for determining when the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel requires the overturning of a criminal conviction due to ineffective assistance of counsel.1 Strickland involved a death penalty case; on its winding path to the Supreme Court, a circuit court panel found in the defendant’s favor...

October 11, 2022

A Tale of Two Cases – Washtech v. DHS and Texas v. USA

Cyrus D. Mehta and Kaitlyn Box, Oct. 11, 2022 - A Tale of Two Cases – Washtech v. DHS and Texas v. USA: To What Extent can the Executive Branch Allow Noncitizens to Remain and Work in the US "To what extent can the Executive Branch allow noncitizens to remain and work in the US when there is no explicit provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) covering these categories of noncitizens? Two courts of...

October 10, 2022

Prof. Peter Margulies on Texas v. U.S. (CA5, DACA)

Prof. Peter Margulies, Lawfare, Oct. 7, 2022 "On Oct. 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in Texas v. United States that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program conflicted with the limits on executive authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The decision was written by Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Priscilla Richman and joined by Judges Kurt Engelhardt and James...

October 10, 2022

Prof. Eisha Jain on Immigration Enforcement: Beyond Deportation

Prof. Eisha Jain, Lawfare, Oct. 5, 2022 "Border enforcement once again dominates contemporary immigration law debates. Yet many legal practices commonly linked to border control—including policing, relocation, and exclusion—actually have little to do with immigration enforcement. Instead, immigration control provides a justification for surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties deep inside the United States...