Immigration law is complicated. A major reason is that it changes so much. In law school, when studying torts or property law, often students read seminal cases from the British House of Lords and “modern” cases from fifty years ago. An immigration lawyer can very seldom rely on an old case’s relevance. Immigration law is statute, agency, and court driven. Statutes and regulations change all the time and courts issue decisions all the time. Compounding the difficulty is that the…

Naturalization is what American immigration law, in all its archaic grandeur, calls becoming a citizen of the United States. The old naturalization application had some funny parts to it. USCIS created a new application. It is twice as long as the old one. I was afraid it would be less funny. Fortunately, it is more funny. One of the funniest questions on the old form was at Page 6, Part 10.A., Question 5: Do you have any title of nobility…

The Ninth Circuit published a “particular social group” case this week, another salvo in the particular social group definition dialectic of the BIA and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The term “particular social group” relates to one of the five grounds for granting asylum, which I blogged about most recently here  and here. The most recent post was about two BIA cases, Matter of W-G-R- and Matter of M-E-V-G-, which addressed particular social group in the gang context. The…

For all these past five or six years we have been reading about how President Obama is the deporter in chief because of the large numbers of deportations under his watch. Recently, data has been published that shows that these deportations have not been happening in immigration court, but rather at ports of entry. Critics of the President somehow are (mis)construing the data as proof that the President has not been a party to the deportation numbers, somehow divorcing him…