The subject of safe third country agreements, or as the U.S. government has begun calling them “Asylum Cooperation Agreements”, has been in the news lately in both the United States and Canada. The U.S. and Canada have had such an agreement with one another since 2002, implemented pursuant to section 208(a)(2)(A) of the Immigration and […]
Under section 301(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. § 1401(c), a child born outside the United States is a citizen when born “of parents both of whom are citizens of the United States and one of whom has had a residence in the United States or one of its outlying possessions, […]
The Trump Administration’s new public charge rule has already been the subject of at least five different lawsuits, including one from a coalition of 13 states led by Washington, another from a California-led coalition of 4 states and the District of Columbia, and another from a coalition of 3 states led by New York, plus […]
The Trump Administration published an announcement in the Federal Register on July 22, 2019 stating that beginning the next day on July 23, it would exercise its full statutory authority to place in expedited removal proceedings essentially all “aliens determined to be inadmissible under sections 212(a)(6)(C) or (a)(7) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA […]
In 2011, I wrote an article on our firm’s website about how then-recent case law could provide an opportunity for some returning nonimmigrants to challenge, in federal court, the government’s efforts to subject them to expedited removal. At the time, it seemed as though such a challenge might require a habeas corpus petition to be […]
In a development decried by several refugee-serving and civil rights organizations, the Canadian government’s proposed budget bill, Bill C-97, contains within it an amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) that would, as described by the bill’s official summary, “introduce a new ground of ineligibility for refugee protection if a claimant has previously […]
In late January, Oregon comedian Mohanad Elshieky was briefly detained by the Border Patrol while traveling on a Greyhound bus in Spokane, Washington. He recounted the incident on Twitter, and it was also reported by a number of news organizations. In summary, the agents boarded the bus at the Spokane Intermodal Bus Station and began […]
For many years, the policy guidance of the Department of State (DOS) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has required that a child show a biological relationship with a U.S. citizen parent in order to acquire U.S. citizenship from that parent. Initially, this meant a genetic relationship; recently, an exception was made for gestational […]
In a November 2017 article, the Washington Post described “How Trump is building a border wall that no one can see”: how the Trump Administration was, “in a systematic and less visible way . . . following a blueprint to reduce the number of foreigners living in the United States — those who are undocumented […]
Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions III recently ruled in Matter of Castro-Tum, 27 I&N Dec. 271 (A.G. 2018), that immigration judges cannot under most circumstances “administratively close” cases before them (other than in a few instances where this is specifically authorized by regulation or court-approved settlement), even though the practice has been followed for many […]
