March 17, 2022

Two Years of Suffering: Biden Administration Continues Use of Discredited Title 42 Order to Flout Refugee Law

Human Rights First, Mar. 16, 2022 "For two years, the U.S. government has  illegally  blocked and  expelled  people seeking refuge at the southern U.S. border despite U.S. laws and treaties created to protect them. Since  March 20, 2020 , the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has used orders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), purportedly issued under Title 42 of U.S. law, to prevent...

March 17, 2022

Expert: EB-5 Investor Visa Program Can Be "Somewhat Opaque"

Hugo Martín, Los Angeles Times, Mar. 14, 2022 "In an aging Hollywood neighborhood known for its dive bars, pawn shops and tattoo parlors, three luxury hotels and a private events center opened over the last five years, with the help of millions of dollars from Chinese investors. The developments — boutique hotels with rooftop pools and hip nightclubs — represented new life for a gritty area a few blocks from Hollywood...

March 16, 2022

DOJ Applauds VAWA Reauthorization

DOJ, Mar. 16, 2022 "Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta today applauded the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). VAWA was reauthorized as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, which President Joe Biden signed into law this week. “Domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking...

March 16, 2022

April 2022 Visa Bulletin

April 2022 Visa Bulletin

March 15, 2022

USCIS Contact Center is More a Source of Frustration than Assistance

Cyrus D. Mehta, Kaitlyn Box, and Jessica Paszko, Mar. 15, 2022 "The  USCIS Contact Center  purports to provide tools for checking case statuses online, correcting notices that contain mistakes or were never delivered, and connecting applicants to a representative for live support. However, the Contact Center is more often a source of frustration than assistance. We outline some of our firm’s experiences with the...

March 15, 2022

The Lifeguard is Drowning: Identifying and Combating Burnout and Secondary Trauma in Asylum Practitioners (Free ABA Webinar)

The Lifeguard is Drowning: Identifying and Combating Burnout and Secondary Trauma in Asylum Practitioners Register here.   Asylum attorneys have been facing a longstanding mental health crisis. The pandemic, sweeping regulatory changes, and uncertainty created deeper dimensions of stress in an already chaotic immigration system. To address this crisis, in 2020, Professors Lindsay Harris and Hillary Mellinger...

March 13, 2022

Congress Reauthorizes EB-5 Regional Center Program

EB-5 Daily, Mar. 11, 2022 "The EB-5 Regional Center Program expired in June 2021.  Since then, the EB-5 Regional Center Program has been in purgatory, with applicants unsure of their status and rights. As of earlier this week, the United States House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have passed an appropriations bill which includes 39-pages of text reauthorizing the EB-5 Regional Center Program, known as...

March 13, 2022

CDC Terminates Title 42 Expulsions for Unaccompanied Children

The 21-page, Mar. 11, 2022 CDC Order is here . The CDC Media Statement is here . Reporting by Camilo Montoya-Galvez is here .

March 11, 2022

ICUMI: Replay This Free ABA CLE Video on Operation Lone Star

Video of free ABA Webinar : Operation Lone Star: Texas’s Costly Attempt to Enforce Federal Immigration Law

March 11, 2022

1.6 Million Family‐​Sponsored Immigrants Will Die Before They Can Immigrate

David J. Bier, Mar. 10, 2022 "The United States hit a new record of about 7.7 million immigrants at various stages in its family‐​based permanent residence process in 2021—an increase of about 400,000 since 2019 and nearly a million since 2016. The staggering number is largely the consequence of outdated numerical limits on green cards last updated in 1990. As a result of the numerical limits on green cards, the...

March 11, 2022

The Moral Clarity of Resettling Refugees

Ali Noorani, Mar. 11, 2022 "... The United States can and must do more—for Ukrainians, yes, but also for refugees fleeing conflict around the world, regardless of their nationality. ..."

March 10, 2022

Dueling Court Orders May Decide Fate of President Biden’s Title 42 Expulsions

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Immigration Impact, Mar 8, 2022 "In just under two years, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has carried out over 1.5 million rapid “expulsions” of asylum seekers and migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border under  Title 42 , a controversial public health law invoked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At least 200,000 parents and children have been expelled, including...

March 08, 2022

ISAP SNAFU, Part 2

Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian, Mar. 8, 2022 " Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (Isap) : The US government program was launched in  2004  as a “humane” alternative to detention for immigrants waiting for their cases to be heard in court, a surveillance system that was supposed to keep track of people in the program while helping them  access social services . Selected by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement...

March 07, 2022

Expert: International Refugee System Reeling

James Dean, Cornell Chronicle, Mar. 5, 2022 " Stephen Yale-Loehr , professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School and faculty fellow in the university’s  Migrations  initiative, discussed the extraordinary humanitarian crisis just beginning as more than 1 million Ukrainians have already fled the country, according to the United Nations. High as that number is, he said, we shouldn’t forget other hot...

March 07, 2022

A Pastor’s Legal Fight Against CBP Exposes a Reckless Surveillance Operation

Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept, Mar. 6, 2022 "A quiet drama unfolding at the intersection of faith, surveillance, and borders, Kaji Dousa’s experience that night in San Diego began a legal fight that continues to this day. As she would later learn, the pastor was one of at least 51 U.S. citizens who were targeted and tracked by their own government for their proximity to asylum-seekers in late 2018 and early 2019...

March 04, 2022

Ukrainians in the U.S. Who May Qualify for Temporary Protected Status: An Overview

American Immigration Council, Mar. 4, 2022 "On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine and advanced toward the capital of Kyiv. The invasion has led for calls for humanitarian protections for Ukrainians—both in the United States and abroad—including a new Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation. TPS is a temporary immigration status provided to nationals of a country that...

March 03, 2022

The Everyday Mistreatment of Transfronterizo Commuters on the Mexico-U.S. Border: A Q&A with Borderlands Scholar Estefanía Castañeda Pérez

Todd Miller, The Border Chronicle, Mar. 3, 2022 - Crossing the border everyday brings the normalization of surveillance and interrogation, but what happens if you refuse to comply with the CBP facial recognition camera? "The data that I have collected has been eye-opening, but one of my most interesting and unexpected findings is that while there were many individuals who recognized that they had experienced human...

March 01, 2022

America’s Labor Shortage: How Low Immigration Levels Accentuated the Problem and How Immigration Can Fix It

Arturo Castellanos-Canales, National Immigration Forum, Feb. 28, 2022 "The United States is facing an acute labor shortage. While the root cause of the problem is multifactorial, America’s lowest net international migration (NIM) levels in decades have accelerated the workforce deficit. In turn, inflation has surged, companies report lost opportunities, and supply chains across economic sectors are severely affected...

March 01, 2022

BIB Editorial Board Member Margaret D. Stock Joins CNSI

CNSI, Feb. 2022 " Margaret D. Stock , Lieutenant Colonel (retired), is an attorney with the Anchorage office of Cascadia Cross Border Law Group LLC, where she devotes her practice to immigration and citizenship matters.  She transferred to the Retired Reserve of the U.S. Army in June 2010 after serving 28 years as a Military Police Officer in the Army Reserve.  While a part-time professor and Reservist assigned...

February 28, 2022

An Unexpected Home

Patricia Sulbarán, Victoria Estrada, Latino USA, Feb. 25, 2022 "Thousands of undocumented immigrants request to voluntarily leave the United States every year. Some experience more complicated situations that lead to forceful stays in their countries of origin. What happens to those people when they return to a place they haven’t lived in for years, maybe even since they were children? On the 10th anniversary...

February 25, 2022

Study: The Importance of Race, Gender and Religion in Natz Adjudications

Emily Ryo, Reed Humphrey, PNAS, March 2022 "This study examines group disparities in naturalization approvals by race/ethnicity, gender, and religion. We find that all else being equal, non-White applicants and Hispanic applicants are less likely to be approved than non-Hispanic White applicants, male applicants are less likely to be approved than female applicants, and applicants from Muslim-majority countries...

February 24, 2022

Mounting Backlogs Undermine U.S. Immigration System and Impede Biden Policy Changes

Muzaffar Chishti and Julia Gelatt, MPI, Feb. 23, 2022 "The Biden administration is seeking to overhaul the U.S. immigration system, expanding protections to hundreds of thousands of immigrants and embarking on a plan to restructure the asylum process at the U.S.-Mexico border. But ever-swelling backlogs in immigration applications and court hearings have slowed legal immigration, threatened to undermine the integrity...

February 23, 2022

Justices Heard Dispute from GOP-Led States over Biden’s Refusal to Defend Legality of Trump-Era Immigration Rule

Amy L. Howe, Feb. 22, 2022 "On Wednesday, the Supreme Court [ heard ] oral argument in a dispute over whether a group of states, led by Arizona, can defend a contentious Trump-era immigration policy known as the “public charge” rule after the Biden administration declined to do so. The oral argument in  Arizona v. City and County of San Francisco  comes less than a week after the justices  agreed to decide  during...

February 23, 2022

Biden EO Blocks Entry of Ukraine Bad Actors

Federal Register / Vol. 87, No. 36 / Wednesday, February 23, 2022 / Presidential Documents Executive Order 14065 of February 21, 2022 "...Sec. 6. (a) The unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of noncitizens determined to meet one or more of the criteria in section 2 of this order would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and the entry of such persons into the United...

February 22, 2022

Free ABA Zoom Webinar - Operation Lone Star: Texas’s Costly Attempt to Enforce Federal Immigration Law (Feb. 24, 2022)

Operation Lone Star: Texas’s Costly Attempt to Enforce Federal Immigration Law (Feb. 24, 2022) On March 6, 2021, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott announced the creation of ‘Operation Lone Star,’ his self-proclaimed “catch and jail” border security initiative. This program deploys Texas Department of Public Safety and National Guard troops to the border region to arrest and jail migrants in unprecedented numbers, on misdemeanor...