It may be anticipation that makes you wait in the song (and ketchup commercial), but in real life it is USCIS that makes you wait. A trip to the Asylum Office in Anaheim, California, can mean reporting for a 6:30 a.m. interview and being called into the interview at 10 a.m. — or later, which is a long time to sit in a waiting room after setting out for the appointment at 4:30 a.m. It made me wonder whether we could apply…

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,…

One of the first and one of the best thing s President Obama did when he first became President was to reverse the Bush-administration policy of detaining nearly all arriving-alien asylum seekers until their cases were adjudicated in the immigration court which I discussed here. His administration instead allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release asylum-seeking aliens after they successfully completed a credible fear interview. As for  arriving aliens with families or who were pregnant, the government would most often…

In immigration law, there are certain crimes an alien can be convicted of that can lead to removal. The immigration statutes, found in the Immigration and Nationality Act, do not list the state crimes and usually not the federal crimes that lead to removal. Rather, the Immigration and Nationality Act names certain types of crimes – such as a “crime of moral turpitude,” or a “theft offense,” or a “crime of violence,” or “sexual abuse of a minor,” or “domestic…