Today, I received an order from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) granting a motion to reopen that I filed on behalf of one of my clients.  My client had been ordered deported in 2006.  He lost his asylum case.  He was found to have suffered past persecution, but was denied because the Immigration Judge found that he could internally relocate in his country and be safe.

My client came to me after he had received a notice to surrender to the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) for his deportation.  When he consulted with me, I remembered that a few weeks earlier, the BIA had rendered a precedent decision called Matter of L-S-, 25 I. & N. Dec. 705 (BIA 2012).  In Matter of L-S-, the Board held that individuals who suffer past persecution, but are denied asylum, may be considered for humanitarian asylum, if they can show “other serious harm.”  When I met with my client for the first time, it occurred to me that he could seek reopening of his case based upon this new decision.  Interestingly, my client has consulted with several other immigration attorneys in New York City and none of them had thought to do this.  The best idea that one of them could come up with was filing a request for deferred action and this immigration lawyer charged him $200 for a consultation!

I filed the motion to reopen and went with my client to the surrender with ICE.  I convinced his deportation officer not to detain him and put him on supervised release pending the outcome of the motion to reopen.  Now that the motion to reopen has been granted, my client will be back before the Immigration Judge, and hopefully, will eventually receive humanitarian asylum.  His case had been over for almost six years and now he might be able to stay in the United States forever.

Last week, I attended an adjustment of status interview with a client and his wife. I’ve since received notice that he was approved for a green card. My client had a federal conviction for failure to provide currency reports pursuant to 31 U.S.C. § 5313(a). He has been in the country illegally since the 1980’s, but was afraid to pursue a green card because of his conviction. Many convictions render aliens inadmissible, so that they are barred from getting a green card, unless they qualify for a waiver and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) grants the waiver. In this particular instance, I happened to know that this particular crime is not considered to be a crime involving moral turpitude, so that a waiver was not necessary. When I submitted the applications for my client, I included a short argument of why my client did not need a waiver for his conviction in the cover letter. At the interview, the officer from CIS read my cover letter and told me that he agreed with me. Now after all of these years, my client no longer has to worry about being deported because he is legal.