One of the first and one of the best thing s President Obama did when he first became President was to reverse the Bush-administration policy of detaining nearly all arriving-alien asylum seekers until their cases were adjudicated in the immigration court which I discussed here. His administration instead allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release asylum-seeking aliens after they successfully completed a credible fear interview. As for  arriving aliens with families or who were pregnant, the government would most often…

In the jargon-rich world of immigration law, an important new phrase came out of amendments to the immigration law in 1996, the 3 and 10 year bars. What these bars say is that if a person accrues more than180 days of unlawful presence in the United States and departs he or she cannot return to the United States for 3 years. If the person accrues a year or more of unlawful presence, this person cannot return for 10 years. A…

An internal USCIS memo floats the idea of making some reforms at USCIS. I recall no other time when the immigration adjudications branch of the U.S. government has begun such a comprehensive analysis of its programs and policies. Some of what is contemplated is procedural in nature – such as reviewing all of USCIS’s policy memoranda to make sure they are internally coherent, publishing regulations to explain how certain laws should be implemented, and figuring out how to make certain programs,…