This blog started more than 20 years ago based on he concept, “What if he was a foreigner?” It analyzed criminal convictions of prominent Americans to show how poorly the result would be for them if they were non-citizens subject to removal laws for their crimes. Today, I’ll apply this analysis to Novak Djokovic, the arguably GALT   tennis player, just excluded and deported from Australia because he, among other things (like lying on his visa application about testing and traveling…

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, taught Sir Isaac Newton; a concept that states a law of physics that probably does not mean as much as we think in non-physics situations. In immigration law, often actions prompt wild, usually-futile reactions. A recent example is reactions to the Pereira case, discussed here and its progenitee, Niz Chavez, here. Pereira, readers may recall from here, is the Supreme Court decision about the stop-time provision of Cancellation of Removal…

  There’s so much activity around “stop-time,” you’d think it affected a lot of people. Well, it does and it doesn’t. I’ve written about it before, like here  and here. To refresh, for certain types of relief from removal, Cancellation for Certain Permanent Residents and Cancellation of Removal for Certain Nonpermanent Residents, there are time of residence and physical presence requirements. The stop-time rules are found at 8 USC § 1229b(d): (1) Termination of continuous period. For purposes of this…

With the United States reeling from a military defeat, a flooded East, and infected South, a parched and burning West, and a rogue judiciary, let’s get into the nitty gritty of naturalization, acquiring United States citizenship. To naturalize, except for exceptions, a person must have held permanent residence for the requisite period (five years or three if married and living with a United States citizen,8 USC § 1430), have resided in the United States for this period (and after applying),…