I recently wrote about how USCIS eschews interaction with attorneys and severely limits the ability of attorneys to interact with it during the adjudication process. Combine USCIS with the Department of State, and the inaccessibility of the bureaucracy is more frustratingly apparent. Here’s my recent example. A Mexican family (Mexican-ness is important to the story. It is not a gratuitous detail.) came to see me about a long-pending visa petition filed twenty years ago by a parent for his son….

A perennial problem in immigration law is the problem of “aging out.” Aging out is when a child on a waiting list for a benefit stops being a child by virtue of the inevitable – he or she grows up. In immigration law relating to visas, one ceases to be a child at age 21 for most purposes. With wait lists for some benefits decades long, aging out is an inevitability. On August 6, 2002, Congress did something about it by…

While immigration is often in the news, the nitty gritty of immigration law, which I write about in this blog, is not. Now, the nitty gritty is in the news with the raging debate about VAWA (Violence Against Women Act). The Republican House of Representatives seeks to modify the current version of VAWA, or the package of laws and amendments that make up the protections for battered people (VAWA does not just apply to women, but to all battered spouses…

Someone called me a couple of weeks ago and asked me about the “new law” they heard about on TV that allows people to bring their families here without delay right away. I explained that there are some new laws under discussion – they have been under discussion since 1996 when “the great triangulator”  signed an immigration reform law, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA) that made many harsh changes to the law. (Lets hope…