I recently wrote about how USCIS eschews interaction with attorneys and severely limits the ability of attorneys to interact with it during the adjudication process. Combine USCIS with the Department of State, and the inaccessibility of the bureaucracy is more frustratingly apparent. Here’s my recent example. A Mexican family (Mexican-ness is important to the story. It is not a gratuitous detail.) came to see me about a long-pending visa petition filed twenty years ago by a parent for his son….

A perennial problem in immigration law is the problem of “aging out.” Aging out is when a child on a waiting list for a benefit stops being a child by virtue of the inevitable – he or she grows up. In immigration law relating to visas, one ceases to be a child at age 21 for most purposes. With wait lists for some benefits decades long, aging out is an inevitability. On August 6, 2002, Congress did something about it by…