Sometimes an issue in immigration law lays shrouded in mystery and then suddenly courts make a series of decisions to clarify what was opaque for decades. The issue of how the government goes about revoking asylum is one of those issues. I think the reason for the sudden burst of interest is that never before has USCIS or its predecessors had the fraud investigation capacities that they have now. What the procedures are for withdrawing asylum grants was never fully…

A legal fiction underpinning administrative law, the Chevron Doctrine, is that federal agencies are best suited to interpreting federal statutes and thus agency decisions interpreting the laws they administer are afforded a great deal of deference. The doctrine, derived from Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, an environmental law case. The Chevron decision held that federal environmental agencies are better able to interpret environmental laws than federal courts and thus their decisions deserve great deference. The Chevron doctrine applies to immigration law…