Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is one of the Gang of Eight. He’s also a Republican and he’s taken a lot of criticism over pushing immigration reform. During the height of the immigration reform frenzy, Senator Rubio set up a really good website on immigration reform. The website has a news tab that provides links to news about immigration reform. However, the news tab hasn’t been updated since June. Since Senator Rubio has stopped updating the news page of his website about immigration reform, does he still care about immigration reform???
FOIA Appeal Victory
Whenever I have a new client that has had dealings with immigration, I usually do a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Under the FOIA law, anyone can ask a the Government for a copy of their immigration file, which is called “the A File.” Immigration lawyers are permitted to do FOIA requests on behalf of their clients.
Recently, I received a response to a FOIA request and documents were intentionally omitted by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS). His prior wife had filed a visa petition for him and the visa petition was denied, but the visa denial was redacted from the FOIA response, so that we did not know why it was denied. I appealed the redaction of the FOIA request and demanded that the visa denial be provided. The CIS agreed with me and provided me with the documents that I requested. The non-redacted information turned out to be helpful to the client’s case.
Discussing Criminal History with an Immigration Lawyer
I’ve developed a new pet peeve. Lately, when I do consultations and ask people what they were convicted of, they tell me they were convicted of a “felony” or “misdemeanor.” Felony and misdemeanor are classifications of crimes. Telling an immigration lawyer that you were convicted of a felony or misdemeanor does not help an immigration attorney to figure out the immigration consequence of your conviction. In order for an immigration attorney to determine the immigration consequence of a conviction, the immigration lawyer needs to know the actual crime that the person received a conviction for. Grounds of removability and inadmissibility in immigration law are based upon convictions. Sometimes whether or not someone was convicted of a misdemeanor or felony will be a factor in determining whether or not someone’s criminal history will cause them an immigration problem. However, an immigration lawyer really needs to know what the conviction was for to determine if a conviction will cause an immigration problem.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- …
- 35
- Next Page »