Senator Joseph Lieberman’s great legacy, besides giving Jon Stewart years of material, is his efforts to create the gargantuan Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and split the former Immigration and Naturalization Service into three separate agencies, Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The breakdown in the agencies’ missions, simply put, is USCIS adjudicates benefits like temporary and permanent residence statuses and citizenship determinations, CBP polices the borders and internal checkpoints,…

I have posted twice about a friend and client, Abdulrahim Kewan, who is stuck in Egypt despite having an approved petition to come to the United States. The background of the case was laid out in a posting on October 17, 2010. To summarize very briefly, Mr. Kewan was applying for permanent residence in the San Diego Immigration Court based on an approved visa petition as a battered spouse. In October 2002, he stopped at a gate at the U.S….

Widespread are complaints about customer service. People talk and write about insufferable time put on hold when calling for help, being transferred from customer service representative to customer service representative, and long waits until someone who can make a decision is located and a decision is made. As bad as any customer service complaint you may have about your credit card company, utility company, mortgage company, or bank, compared to USCIS, they are head and shoulders above the service USCIS…

For years before it actually happened in 2003, many immigration-law pundits advocated for the division of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into different components. The idea was that the cultures of benefit granting and enforcement were incompatible. When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2003, the immigration functions of the INS were moved from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and given to the new DHS. Within DHS, INS functions were, like a dream come true…