We are lucky here at the firm to meet so many interesting and talented people from all over the world. But nothing is more frustrating than when we meet someone with a genuine and legitimate reason to be in or come to the US, but we are unable to help them because there is no appropriate visa type that matches their qualifications or situation. This got us to thinking—what if we could invent or re-style existing visas to match some of the people we meet and cannot help. We may have to get creative with the alphabet here…
Read moreGivin’ it Up: Loss of United States Citizenship
As an immigration lawyer, I am very fortunate to work every day with people from all over the world and from vastly different backgrounds. I do this while representing people in removal proceedings, in deferred action applications, and all manner of work visa petitions. For a clear majority of these people, there is one ultimate goal: US citizenship. For many, acquiring US citizenship is a lifelong and closely-held ambition, emotionally bound up with the process of leaving their home country and establishing a life here in the US. For others, it is a matter of convenience—allowing them the freedom to remain outside the US for extended periods of time without worrying about being found to abandon their permanent resident (Green Card) status, or to petition for family members from abroad to immigrate to the United States.
Read moreAll About RFEs
You’ve given your attorney all the requested documents. All forms have been signed, T’s crossed and I’s dotted. And off goes your application or petition to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). Now all you have to do is wait for an approval notice in the mail, right? But you receive a letter that requests “additional evidence.” The dreaded RFE (Request for Evidence). What does it mean? How do you respond? Why did this happen?
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Beyond H, L, O, and B: Lesser Known Visa Types
Much immigration practice is centered on only a handful of the nonimmigrant visa categories in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Every day we encounter those familiar letters—H (for the H-1B professional visa type), L (for intracompany transferees), O (for O-1 artists and their O-2 essential support personnel), not to mention B (the ubiquitous B-1/B-2 for tourists and temporary business visitors). But the same section 101(a)(15) of the INA offers a true alphabet soup, and I decided to take a gander at some of the lesser-known visa types.
Read moreSecession 2015
Abi Classy / Tea for Two Photography
We have a lot of very talented people working at our firm. One of these is Alexis Roblan, a legal writer who is also a playwright. She is one of seven writers who worked with Brooklyn-based Exquisite Corpse Company on Secession 2015, a collaborative immersive theater event which opened this past weekend on Governors Island (where Joseph found his lost umbrellas). Taking its name and inspiration from the Vienna Secession of the early 1900s, an Austrian multi-disciplinary art movement led by Gustav Klimt, the show is a series of seven short plays (one of which is by Alexis!) inspired by six artists from that movement, woven together and performed in a house that’s been turned into an art gallery and performance space for the summer.
What I particularly enjoyed was how each of the plays was a kind of feminist re-imagining of the period and the art movement. Alexis’s piece, “Marietta,” profiled a female artist of the era arguing with her subject, Marietta, about her place in the art movement, and humorously (and tragically) illustrated the unique “arranged marriage” she entered into as a way to maintain her artistic (and financial) independence. Other pieces explored the relationship between many of the famous artists of the day and their female “muses.” The muses—all of whom were dressed the same—guided the audience through the house (each scene performed in a different room), and even performed group musical numbers that were somber and funny all at once. I really appreciated the show’s creativity and surprising cohesion, and I highly recommend it.
Secession 2015 will be performed twice a day on Governors Island (accessible via ferry) at Nolan Park House #17 every Saturday and Sunday until September 20.
How One NYC Organization Is Preserving and Promoting Threatened Languages
One of the things I like most about living in New York and working in immigration law is my exposure to a diversity of languages and dialects. As a global capital, New York is lucky to have thriving language communities representing languages from all over the world. And yet it cannot be denied that migration plays a role in some major language shifts and language loss.
Read moreWhy I’m Pro Pro Bono and You Should Be Too
Pro bono refers to work for the public good and in service to low-income clients. As legal professionals, our law licenses symbolize the economic monopoly we have over the provision of legal services. With that monopoly comes an obligation to ensure that those legal services are available to all who need them, and not just the select few that can afford to pay for them. There are few fields where this obligation is more important than in immigration law. Unlike criminal law, where a defendant has a constitutional right to be provided an attorney in the event that they cannot afford one, in immigration law–and most other areas of civil law–there is no right to free counsel. Over the last decade, there has been an increasing recognition of the need for a “civil Gideon” right (Gideon refers to the seminal Supreme Court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that established the right to counsel in criminal proceedings)–the right to counsel for the poor in civil matters, including housing, family, and immigration law, among other areas of law.
Read moreBehind the News Story: NY Times: “Bronx Woman’s 10 Marriages, Not All of Them Over, Lead to Fraud Charges”
Earlier this spring, the incredible story of Liana Kristina Barrientos was all over the news. According to numerous sources, Ms. Barrientos had married at least ten men over an eleven-year period, claiming on each marriage application to have never been married before, and without obtaining divorces from the prior husbands (well, at least some of them). News sources openly speculated that the marriages were entered into for immigration benefits, pointing out the criminal investigation about Ms. Barrientos’s polygamy had been initiated following a tip from investigators from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which administers immigration benefits through US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) and investigates and prosecutes immigration law violations through Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ms. Barrientos, a native of the Dominican Republic and a US citizen, allegedly married the men in order for them to obtain Green Cards. The men were identified only by their initials and their countries of origin.
Read moreOPINION: A Lifeline at the Border: No More Deaths
For decades there has been an increased militarization of the US-Mexico border. For most of the country’s history, the southwest has been culturally and economically connected to the northwest Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California Norte. After the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees fled the wars in their countries and crossed our southern border, the US government began to construct walls and other barriers to stem the tide. In 1994, the government implemented Operation Gatekeeper, whose aim was to deter would-be migrants from crossing at the historic and well-worn crossings around the Tijuana/San Diego corridor. To some extent, the plan worked—fewer people crossed near the major population centers. But they did not stop coming. Instead, people were pushed out further and further into the extremely inhospitable terrain of the Sonora desert of southern Arizona. By the late 1990s, southern Arizona became the epicenter of a migration, and ground zero of an increasingly deadly journey. There do not appear to be good statistics of how many people die crossing into the US, but several thousand deaths have been documented over the last two decades, and it is estimated that several hundred die each year from dehydration, hypothermia, drowning, or exhaustion.
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