A year and a half ago I wrote about a January 26, 2012, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Oshodi v. Holder (Oshodi I). The case presented an intra-circuit split on the issue of when an alien must provide corroborating evidence in an asylum hearing. An earlier Ninth Circuit case, Ren v. Holder, held: Therefore, the IJ must undertake the following sequential analysis. To begin, the IJ must determine whether an applicant’s credible testimony alone meets the applicant’s burden…

Of all the arcana that exists in the immigration law world, the subject that always seems to return is visa waiver adjustments. I have written about it quite often, such as here, where I provide the background of the issue and links to other articles. In a nutshell, visa waiver entrants are people who lawfully come to the United States without visas. This is a benefit provided to citizens of certain countries. The law about visa waiver entry is found…

On June 11, 2013, I wrote about how when an attorney calls the USCIS National Customer Service Center (NCSC)  the wait is more than an hour, but when an alien calls about his or her own case, he or she gets nearly immediate help. It turns out I was not just being paranoid. Lawyers were being treated differently. The NCSC works on a two-tier system. Normal inquiries go to Tier One and “unique and complex cases,” i.e., cases you actually…

Eight years ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided a case, Tchoukhrova v. Gonzales, which involved a mother seeking asylum because her son, who was severely disabled, was denied all medical care. The Ninth Circuit found in the mother’s favor, which the government did not like. A discussion of the post-decision procedural history of the case, including its being vacated by the Supreme Court and that it is still cited, is discussed here. Today, in Sumolang v. Holder, the…