Articles Posted in News

If one recalls the earthquake from back in 2010 that hit Haiti, USCIS provided some relief options for Haitians affected by the earthquake, whether it was those currently living in Haiti or Haitians still in the United States. Recently, USCIS issued a statement regarding immigration relief options for Filipinos affected by Typhoon Haiyan. USCIS understands that a natural disaster can affect an individual’s ability to establish or maintain lawful immigration status in the United States. Therefore, Filipino nationals impacted by Typhoon Haiyan may be eligible to benefit from the following immigration relief measures:

Change or extension of nonimmigrant status for an individual currently in the United States, even when the request is filed after the authorized period of admission has expired;

Extension of certain grants of parole made by USCIS;

An eleventh hour deal was finally struck between Democrats and Republicans to reopen the government while they work out a long term fiscal budget for the federal government. The deal calls for the government to remain open until January 15, 2014 while Congress works on a long term budget over the next few months. The debt ceiling was also raised until February 7, 2014, meaning Congress spending and borrowing power remains in effect until that date. The impact of this deal has some very important, short term effects on some of the operations concerning our immigration matters. Some of these include the following:

– The Department of Labor is back in operation, meaning business employers can petition for immigrant workers again and that iCERT and PERM services are available.

– E-Verify is back in operation, meaning employers can verify their employees immigration statuses again

In recent news, despite the government shutdown, immigration reform is still on the minds of many who want that change to happen. Amid the political gloom of a government shutdown and the threat of default if a budget compromise is not brokered soon, immigration reform advocates are hardly basking in the momentum they enjoyed this summer. But backers of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants are keeping up the public fight in spite of a bleak outlook for legislative action this year.

Thousands descended on the National Mall on Tuesday, chanting “Si se puede” — “Yes we can”– as mostly Democratic lawmakers told them not to give up the push for reform. Despite the gridlocked political climate, many in attendance remained optimistic, but frustrated.

“I’m not sure when it’s going to, but I think it’s going to happen. We have momentum, like a snowball that is rolling,” said Juan Frias, a Fairfax, Va., a resident originally from Mexico. “But we know this will not be easy.”
“Congress needs to get their act together,” said Rebecca Diaz, a Puerto Rican who moved to Washington, D.C., one year ago. “I’m going to fight for immigration reform right now. Not in a year, not in five months, right now,” she said.

That fight meant a trip to jail for some, including some lawmakers. Eight House members outspoken about the immigration issue — including Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. — were among those arrested for civil disobedience during a march after the organized rally and charged with “crowding, obstructing, and incommoding” near the Capitol.

With the ongoing shutdown, the rally’s location on the National Mall was itself the subject of controversy. A week after World War II Honor Flight participants made national headlines for fighting for access to the shuttered national memorial honoring their service, critics said that immigration rights ralliers – including some who might be undocumented immigrants – should not be able to use space that would otherwise be closed because of the funding lapse.

The National Park Service granted the host organizations access to the area for “First Amendment activities.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., commended the park service for “bending over backwards” to ensure the rally took place on the National Mall, directly between the Washington Monument and the Capitol.

Legislative progress on a comprehensive immigration bill –once seen as on track to being signed by the president after a bipartisan Senate vote to advance it – has all but halted. House Speaker John Boehner declined to put the Senate-passed bill up for a vote, waiting instead on “piecemeal” legislation from GOP House members. A years-in-the-making effort by a coalition of bipartisan House members to create their own comprehensive bill gradually crumbled.

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With the U.S. Government shutdown looming, many are wondering how immigration will be directly impacted by U.S. Congress’ failure to pass a budget bill to keep our services in operation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has passed on information regarding key services that will be directly impacted by the government shutdown. These key services directly affect business immigration the most with respect to employers being able to hire foreign workers because of the involvement of the Dept. of Labor in that process. The Dept of Labor put out this notice to practitioners and individuals who will be affected by the government shutdown:

“OFLC functions are not “excepted” from a shutdown and its employees would be placed in furlough status should a lapse in appropriated funds occur. Consequently, in the event of a government shutdown, OFLC will neither accept nor process any applications or related materials (such as audit responses), it receives, including Labor Condition Applications, Applications for Prevailing Wage Determination, Applications for Temporary Employment Certification, or Applications for Permanent Employment Certification. OFLC’s web site, including the iCERT Visa Portal System, would become static and unable to process any requests or allow authorized users to access their online accounts.”

Basically, the statement from the DOL is that many of the services that business immigration clients use to allow individuals to work in the U.S. will be placed on hold until the budget is resolved and appropriations are made to allow those functions to work again. As of tomorrow, no further services by iCERT and PERM’s websites will put a lot of those cases on hold until the U.S. Congress has resolved its budgetary concerns.

The question prompted in this article is on the minds of many individuals. For those who are interested in immigration services, it is hard to fathom that the U.S. Government could shut down and no longer provide any immigration services for those who want to get visas to come to the U.S., those who have visas that need renewing, or others who have different immigration matters to address. Well rest assured that the government “shutting down” does not mean that all of its services will cease functioning while the U.S. Congress resolves its budget. In fact, many agencies and government functions are exempt from a shutdown. All government agencies that are not funded through annual congressional appropriations will not be affected. In addition, there are certain functions deemed “excepted” by the federal government that may continue in an absence of appropriations. Such functions include those necessary for emergencies involving “the safety of human life or the protection of property,” and those necessary for activities essential to national security, including the conduct of foreign affairs essential to national security.

Now if you are wondering what will be affected by the government shut down the most, these agencies, groups, services are affected the most:

1. Washington, D.C. – The city of Washington, D.C. will face limited sanitation services while the government resolves its budget issues. In addition, all Department of Motor Vehicles locations would be closed as well as all of the city’s public libraries. Washington’s Department of Transportation “will be operating with a skeletal crew, so routine maintenance and repairs will cease.” Other departments, including police, fire and public schools, will remain open.

The head of a now out-of-business Los Angeles law firm was sentenced Thursday to 10 months in prison for his role in orchestrating a lengthy employment visa fraud scheme where the illicit profits were used to purchase several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of vacant cemetery plots and grave monuments.

Joseph Wai-Man Wu, 53, former president of the East West Law Group, pleaded guilty in August 2011 to one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud, one count of money laundering and one count of obstruction of justice. As part of a plea agreement reached in February, Wu surrendered a portion of his profits derived from the visa fraud scheme, forfeiting to the government 30 vacant cemetery plots and 20 grave monuments, all of which were purchased with proceeds from the scam. Wu used the cemetery plot purchasing scheme to launder some of the money he unlawfully obtained through the visa fraud scheme. The grave plots will now be sold at public auction and the proceeds given to the U.S. Treasury.

Wu’s sentencing is the latest development in a 2 ½-year investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) that also involved the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Fraud Detection and National Security Unit.

An operation by federal immigration agents in Detroit set off protests from Latino and church groups on Wednesday after the officers stopped two illegal immigrants as they were dropping off their children at school.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement followed both immigrants, who are from Mexico, as they left their homes in southwest Detroit on Tuesday morning, officials from the agency said. Both men had children in their vehicles.

One of the men, Jorge Hernandez, said he was pulled over by agents in unmarked cars across the street from his 4-year-old daughter’s school, the Manuel Reyes Vistas Nuevas Head Start center in southwest Detroit. Mr. Hernandez was questioned but eventually released.

The other man, Hector Orozco Villa, told immigrant advocates that he had been detained by agents near the elementary school of two of his children, Cesar Chavez Academy, a few blocks from the Head Start center. Mr. Orozco remains in the custody of the agency, which is known as ICE.

The presence of the immigration agents has spread alarm among arriving parents and children in the Latino neighborhood, school officials said. More than 100 people rallied on Wednesday to protest, according to a report in The Detroit News, saying the immigration agency had broken an earlier promise to avoid arrests near schools and other community gathering points.

“It is very alarming to me to have this happen during the rush hour of people taking their children to school,” said Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic state representative who attended the rally. “We are really worried about the impact on these United States citizen children.” Several of Mr. Hernandez’s and Mr. Orozco’s children were born in the United States.

The incident revealed the raw sensitivities in some immigrant communities as federal agents are required to carry out the increasingly complex deportation policy of the Obama administration. Agents have been instructed to focus on capturing illegal immigrants who are convicted criminals or repeat immigration violators, and to avoid detaining those who have committed no serious crimes and have strong family ties to the United States. Determining which individuals fall in either category has been a difficult balance for ICE to maintain while carrying out the directive.

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The federal government will formally instruct immigration agents to consider same-sex relationships the same way as heterosexual relationships in deciding whether a person should be deported.

The announcement by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano comes as welcome news to some Democrats in Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who had voiced concerns already that informal instructions to do so could be ignored by immigration agents.

Napolitano said on Thursday she would issue the instruction in writing to immigration agents. The administration had only informally indicated same-sex relationships would be taken into account when making deportation decisions.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law that will allow hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and vetoed another that would have restricted sheriffs from helping federal authorities detain undocumented Californians for potential deportation.

The driver’s license measure will allow illegal immigrants to drive legally in California if they qualify for a new federal work permit program. The Obama administration’s executive order known as Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) allows illegal immigrants who came to the United States before they were 16, and who are now 30 or younger and meet certain other criteria, to obtain work permits.

“Gov. Brown believes the federal government should pursue comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship,” said Brown spokesman Gil Duran. “President Obama has recognized the unique status of these students, and making them eligible to apply for driver’s licenses is an obvious next step.”

A while back we posted on Alabama’s immigration bill which would allow schools to check the immigration status of new students in its public schools. Part of Alabama’s immigration law that ordered public schools to check the citizenship of new students was ruled unconstitutional Monday by the federal appeals court that also said police in that state and Georgia could demand papers from criminal suspects they had detained.

The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Alabama schools provision wrongly singled out children who were in the country illegally. Alabama was the only state that passed such a requirement; the 11th Circuit previously had blocked that part of the law from being enforced.

Judges said fear of the law “significantly deters undocumented children from enrolling in and attending school.”