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| CRS' Summary of Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the 113th Congress |  | Congressional Research Service's (CRS) July 10, 2013 publication, Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the 113th Congress: Short Summary of Senate-Passed S. 744, which briefly outlines major provisions of the CIR bill amended and passed by the Senate on June 27, 2013.
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Beach-Oswald Immigration Law Associates, PC are Washington, DC immigration attorneys. Our law firm is devoted exclusively to immigration law. We have an AV rating (highest possible rating for lawyers for legal acumen and ethical standards). Practicing law since 1981.
For a second year in a row, Danielle Beach-Oswald has been nominated as a SuperLawyer by The Washington Post! Thank you to all of our supporters!
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Recent Grants & Successes by BOILA
|  Grants by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
Mr. M, a native of Cameroon, had his removal proceedings reopened by the Board of Immigration Appeals. BOILA assisted Mr. M in filing a motion to reopen based on changed country conditions in his native country. As a result of his marriage to a Cameroonian refugee and the couple's political opposition activities in the U.S., Mr. M's family members were targeted by the Cameroonian government. BOILA is hopeful that based on such facts and evidence, Mr. M will be granted asylum in his reopened removal proceedings.
BOILA is pleased to share that Ms. F's Petition for Review was granted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The Department of Justice, Office of Immigration Litigation agreed with BOILA's legal arguments and submitted a motion to remand Ms. F's case for a new decision, free of legal and factual error. Ms. F. was represented by another attorney during her removal proceedings and hired BOILA solely to assist her on appeal. Despite having a difficult case, Ms. F now has new hope that she will be granted political asylum in the United States.
Ms. B, a native citizen of Cameroon, had her removal proceedings reopened and terminated by the BIA. Ms. B entered the U.S. in 1999, fleeing political persecution in Cameroon. While represented by another attorney, Ms. B's application for asylum was denied in 2001 by the Baltimore Immigration Court and she was ordered deported. For over a decade, she has lived in limbo, fearing she may be arrested and deported to Cameroon. BOILA assisted Ms. B in filing a motion to reopen based on exceptional circumstances, namely the extreme hardship that her US citizen husband and two children would endure in the event of her deportation. Based on the evidence presented, DHS agreed to join in the motion. BOILA looks forward to now being able to assist Ms. B in filing for her green card.
Ms. T, a native of Cameroon, was finally granted asylum by the Baltimore Immigration Court. Ms. T had initially come to the U.S. in 2003, fleeing political persecution on account of her membership with the SCNC. While represented by another attorney, her application was denied and she was ordered deported in 2005. In 2009, BOILA assisted Ms. T in filing a motion to reopen her case before the BIA based on changed country conditions in Cameroon, namely the persecution of her immediate family members on account of her political activism in the US. After her case was remanded by the BIA, BOILA helped Ms. T in overcoming the Court's prior concerns about her case, allowing her to finally be recognized as a refugee in the United States.
Mr. N, a native of Cameroon, was granted adjustment of status by the Arlington Immigration Court. Mr. N has been married to his US citizen wife for 6 years. Despite prior denials by USCIS, BOILA successfully assisted him in obtaining his green card.
Mr. Y, a native of Cameroon, was also granted adjustment of status by the Baltimore Immigration Court. Mr. Y entered the U.S.. in 2008, fleeing political persecution. After getting married to his U.S. citizen wife in 2010, the couple is now able to move forward with their lives without fear that Mr. Y will be deported.
Ms. M, a native of Cameroon - we applied for asylum and Section 13. She was granted permanent residency.
Grants by USCIS
Mr. K, a native of Algeria, was granted asylum by the Arlington Asylum Office. Mr. K is still a minor and he is now able to enter adulthood and plan for his future without fearing for his safety. Having left Algeria when he was still a toddler and then raised as a devout Catholic in Italy, BOILA helped Mr. K establish that he possessed a well-founded fear of religious persecution if forced to return to Algeria.
Mr. M, a native of Cameroon, was granted asylum by the Arlington Asylum Office based on his membership in a particular social group, comprised of homosexuals in Cameroon. On account of being gay, Mr. M was physically assaulted and at risk of being arrested and imprisoned, as homosexuality is a crime under the Penal Code in Cameroon. Given the credible evidence on country conditions in Cameroon concerning the persecutions of gay men and women, BOILA assisted Mr. M in establishing that he possessed a well-founded fear of future persecution.
Ms. N, a native of Cameroon, received an approved I-360 Abused Spouse petition. Ms. N was a victim of physical abuse and psychological abuse at the hands of her U.S. citizen husband. BOILA wishes her the best now that she is able to move forward with her life. BOILA expects that she will soon be receiving her green card through the I-360 approval.
Ms. W, a native of Kenya, received the approval of an I-360, Abused Spouse Petition. Ms. W was married to her husband for over 10 years, during which time she endured severe physical and psychological abuse. She is an extremely strong woman as well as a mother to 3 U.S. citizen children and BOILA was pleased to have had the opportunity to assist her.
Ms. B, a native of Guinea, received an approved I-360, Abused Spouse petition. Ms. B endured years of severe physical abuse and emotional cruelty during her marriage, and was deserving of relief under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).
Ms. E, a native of Nigeria, received the approval of her I-360 Abused Spouse Petition. Ms. E was married to her US citizen husband for 6 years, Throughout the course of their marriage, Ms. E's husband subjected her to repeated physical and emotional abuse as well as repeatedly threatened her, using her immigration status in this country as a means of exerting his control over her. BOILA worked hard to overcome a prior denial of an I-130 petition and allegations by USCIS that the marriage was not bona fide. BOILA is now able to assist Ms. E is seeking her green card before the Baltimore Immigration Court.
Ms. D, a native of Mali, was granted permanent residency by USCIS based on her bona fide marriage to her U.S. citizen husband. Mrs. D is now able to remain in the U.S. with her husband and their two children.
Mr. T, a native of Vietnam, received his permanent residency. BOILA assisted Mr. T and his wife in the filing of a Form I-751 Petition, removing the conditions placed on his green card. BOILA assisted the couple in overcoming a request for evidence from USCIS, questioning the legitimacy of their marriage, and successfully established that they entered the marriage in good faith and continue to share a life together.
Ms. F, a citizen of Cameroon, was granted relief under DACA. Ms. F entered the US on in 2002 when she was just 13 years old and she has never left the country. She graduated high school in the U.S. and went on attend college. Through the grant, she is now finally able to obtain work authorization and not live in fear of her removal from the United States.
Ms. D, a native of Cameroon, was granted permanent residency based on having previously been granted asylum in the United States.
Mr. V, a native of the Netherlands, was granted conditional permanent residency through his marriage to his U.S. citizen wife.
Ms. G, a native of Cameroon, received the approval of her I-130, Alien Relative Petition, filed on her behalf by her Lawful Permanent Resident spouse. BOILA looks forward to assisting her in obtaining her permanent residency.
Mr. D, a native of Senegal, received an approved I-130 petition, filed on his behalf by his US citizen wife. The couple has been married since 2007 and despite repeatedly delays caused by USCIS, the petition has finally been approved, allowing Mr. D to seek permanent residency before the Baltimore Immigration Court.
Ms. B, a native of Nigeria, who had entered the U.S. in 1989, was granted adjustment of status based on her status of a parent of a US citizen child. BOILA helped Ms. B overcome legal hurdles surrounding whether she was inadmissible for having committed fraud in a prior application for adjustment of status. BOILA helped convince USCIS that Ms. B had not intentionally misrepresented information on her prior application, allowing her to obtain permanent residency WITHOUT the waiver that had been previously denied in Baltimore.
Ms. F, a native of Cameroon, was received her green card through the approval of an I-130 petition, filed on her behalf by her U.S. citizen husband. Despite the fact that Ms. F is currently attending medical school out of state and is unable to reside with her husband much of the year, BOILA helped the couple establish the bona fides of their marriage.
Mr. T., a native of Cameroon, was granted permanent residency in the United States based on his marriage to his U.S. citizen wife.
Mr. T, a native of Cameroon, was granted permanent residency in the United States, based on having an approved I-130 petition, which was previously filed on his behalf by his U.S. citizen mother.
Finally, BOILA is pleased to announce that six of our clients were recently naturalized and became US citizens. BOILA congratulates Mr. F and Ms. I (natives of Cameroon), Mr. M (a native of Congo Brazzaville), Ms. T (a native of Togo), Mr. W (a native of Nigeria), and Ms. S (a native of Hungary) on their US citizenship.
BOILA is pleased to have had the opportunity to help them in their immigration matters.
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| ICE Agrees to Lift Veil of Secrecy from the Criminal Alien Program |  by James Sellars
Earlier this month, a U.S. District Court in Connecticut approved a settlement in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit which challenged Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) refusal to release thousands of documents regarding the operation of its Criminal Alien Program (CAP). In an effort to better understand the daily workings of CAP, the American Immigration Council, in collaboration with Yale Law School and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, filed a FOIA lawsuit to compel ICE to disclose all pertinent information and documents. The settlement is seen as a monumental victory for proponents of transparency in immigration proceedings, and the release of these new documents will hopefully shed new light on an otherwise obscure governmental program. This article briefly describes ICE's Criminal Alien Program and then highlights the provisions of the aforementioned settlement agreement.
Criminal Alien Program
Despite being one of the ICE's largest enforcement programs, very little information about the Criminal Alien Program(CAP) has been made available to the public thus far. Every year CAP facilitates the removal of thousands of individuals and is implicated in approximately half of all deportation proceedings in the U.S. ICE estimates that in 2011 there were 701,473 "CAP encounters" resulting in 221,122 arrests. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, CAP is currently active in all state and federal prisons in addition to more than 300 local jails throughout the country. CAP is characterized as one of several so-called "jail status check" programs intended to screen individuals in federal, state, and local prisons for removability. While other such jail status check programs, like Secure Communities, have garnered much more attention, CAP is by far the oldest and largest such interface between the criminal justice system and federal immigration authorities. Other activities encompassed under CAP include the investigation and arrest of non-detained non-citizens.
While CAP purportedly targets only the worst criminal offenders, critics have often accused ICE of using the secretive nature of the program to abuse its discretion. Some groups argue that the lack of uniform policies encourage abuse by personnel at prisons and jails, as well as ICE agents undertaking CAP activities. For example, there appears to be very few guidelines governing the circumstances under which CAP interviews and screenings are conducted. Accordingly, some ICE agents could potentially elicit admissions of foreign birth through non-voluntary, misleading, or coercive interrogation. Additionally, the American Immigration Lawyers Association claims that the program has a history of targeting individuals with little or no criminal history. Another concern is that CAP incentivizes pre-textual stops and racial profiling. For example, a police officer may arrest a person of Latino descent, rather than issue a citation, to allow a CAP officer to subsequently investigate his or her immigration status. A study of arrest data in Irving, Texas, found that local police regularly arrested Latinos to check their immigration status through CAP. These potential abuses, coupled with ICE's reluctance to disclose information about the program, prompted the American Immigration Council to file suit in federal court.
Settlement Agreement
Under the recent settlement, ICE has agreed to produce numerous records including a report of all encounters by ICE officials with individuals in the CAP program since 2010. Additionally, policies and other guidelines pertaining to the implementation and operation of CAP will be made available to the public, including interviewing procedures and arrest quotas. ICE's acknowledgement of arrest quotas is likely to spark significant backlash from human rights groups and the implementation of CAP's quota system is likely to be a main source of contention moving forward. Furthermore, ICE has agreed to release records regarding the relationship between CAP and other agency programs such as Secure Communities. Lastly, ICE has agreed to disclose all policies regarding racial profiling in CAP activities, although critics have already conceded that they have extremely low expectations on this front, setting the stage for potential civil rights litigation.
Since the conclusion of the trial, the American Immigration Council has updated a CAP fact sheet giving a comprehensive overview of the program. According to the updated fact sheet, many elements of the CAP program have only recently come to light as a direct result of the steps taken during the FOIA lawsuit. In regards to CAP's current organization and staffing, the information obtained via the lawsuit suggests that CAP is not a single program, but a loose conglomerate of several different programs operating within the ICE framework. This assertion is supported by the fact that there is no dedicated CAP staff other than a small contingent of staffers at ICE headquarters who are responsible for the administration of the program. Instead of establishing a separate CAP office, ICE pulls personnel and resources from across the agency to perform CAP-related functions.
Previous ICE declarations, coupled with agency depositions given during the course of the lawsuit, have helped explain how CAP functions within Federal, State, and local prisons. There appears to be little consistency in, and little or no policy governing, how CAP cooperates with individual state and local law enforcement agencies in different regions. Additionally, there seems to be little or no consistency in how CAP interacts with detainees in various facilities. Instead, CAP appears to function as an ad hoc set of activities that operate differently across the country and across penal institutions, raising questions about the adequacy of oversight, training, and accountability of the personnel implementing the CAP program.
It is still unclear how much of the information gathered about CAP is going to be used and revealed at a local level. Given the sheer size of the program, the centrality of its role in immigration enforcement, and its large impact on the immigrant community, it is paramount for ICE to adequately disclose the materials needed to understand how the program operates.
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| Settlement by Justice Department against Employer Discrimination |  In early June, the Justice Department's settlement with a leading facility services company proved that the INA's anti-discrimination provision prohibiting employers from discrimination against non-citizens is a necessary and enforceable doctrine. ISS Facility Services Company is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas and employs approximately 15,000 employees in the United States.
Based on a referral from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Justice Department began an investigation on the company. The issue was whether the ISS offices in Dallas and Houston were requiring non-citizens to present specific U.S. Department of Homeland Security-issued documents to establish their identity and work-authority while not having the same requirements for U.S. citizens. The INA includes an anti-discrimination provision which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against noncitizens by demanding more or different documents than U.S. citizens would be required to present.
Pursuant to this provision, the Justice Department and ISS reached a settlement where ISS agreed to ensure that all its offices would provide training and comply with the INA's anti-discrimination provision. ISS also agreed to pay $49,800 to the United States to identify and compensate any individuals who may have suffered economic injuries as a result of its practices. Additionally, ISS agreed to have their employment eligibility verification practices monitored by the department for the next two years.
As Gregory Friel, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, noted: "We commend ISS for its exemplary cooperation in working with the department to identify the source of the problems in its employment eligibility verification process at two of its offices and to work with the department in addressing those problems." ISS' settlement sends a message to employers that they must comply with the INA's anti-discrimination provision, and companies that fail to do so will be held accountable for their unjust actions.
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| Stepping Up: Federal Immigration Agencies Begin Implementing Windsor on LGBTQ Issues |  Earlier this month, Lexology published an article discussing the recent steps taken by federal agencies to align the Nation's immigration policies with the recent Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Windsor. The article, written by Helen Pihlstrom, gave an in-depth analysis on the preliminary efforts taken by various governmental agencies to ensure that their administrative frameworks conform to the aforementioned ruling. Pihlstrom's article primarily focuses on the efforts of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (U.S.C.I.S.) and the State Department.
U.S.C.I.S.
On July 1st, 2013, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano gave the order to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to immediately begin reviewing family petitions filed in favor of same-sex spouses, emphasizing that these applications should be handled in the same manner as applications for heterosexual couples. In her article, Pihlstrom discusses some of the formal steps that U.S.C.I.S. has recently taken in order to implement Napolitano's July 1st directive. For example, U.S.C.I.S. recently announced that individuals may now seek all applicable immigration benefits for same-sex spouses, including immigrant visa applications, fiancé/fiancée petitions, and other benefits without waiting for further official guidance or forms. Moreover, U.S.C.I.S. has decided to re-open and reconsider cases that were denied based on the Defense of Marriage Act. This decision is likely to create a need for more detailed administrative guidelines on how to review previously denied cases.
One of the major policy questions to come out of the DOMA decision is how to treat individual applicants who reside in one of many states that do not recognize same-sex marriages? Pihlstrom does an excellent job in explaining how U.S.C.I.S. plans to deal with this lingering question. According to her, U.S.C.I.S. will consider the law of the place where the marriage was celebrated when making a determination about whether the marriage is legally valid for immigration purposes. This includes marriages that are performed in countries that legally recognize same-sex marriages.
State Department
This article concludes by discussing some of the recent steps taken by the State Department in implementing the Supreme Court's ruling on DOMA. On August 2, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that U.S. consulates would begin processing visa applications on behalf of same-sex spouses. Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) provided additional guidance on the issuance of I-20 Forms for international students. Pihlstrom explains that the August 5th guidance provides for Designated School Officials at U.S. universities to issue I-20 Forms for same-sex dependent spouses of F-1 or M-1 student visa holders. Similar to the new U.S.C.I.S. determinations, school officials are required to verify the validity of the same-sex marriage by determining if the marriage is valid in the place of celebration. Although implementation of the Windsor decision is still in its early stages, the progress thus far is extremely encouraging for proponents of LGBTQ rights. |
Is United States' Decision Correct In Closing 22 Embassies Across The World?
|  Decision Coming Under Scrutiny The decision taken by the U.S government to close 22 embassies and consulates across the parts of Africa and Middle East, stretching towards south of Madagascar and as far as East as Oman, has been under scrutiny. Barbara Starr in her article in CNN has emphasized that the reason behind this decision was the blasts in the U.S embassy in Turkey in the month of February 2013. U.S government has regularly kept note of terrorist's movements under its radar. Recently there was an intercepted message among the Al Qaeda operatives which led to alarm, forcing the U.S government to close the Embassies. The time period of the attack is unknown due to which most of the embassies in parts of Africa and the Middle East may be closed for the month of August.
This decision by the Obama government has been under checkand has caused mixed reactions between the U.S officials. But the reality is that thestep of closing of the 22 embassies over such a broader area has never taken place in the history of any country. In an interview to CNN, Christopher Hill, a former U.S ambassador to Iraq stated "I have never seen embassy closures ordered across such a broader area". There have been instances where the U.S government had closed its Embassies in a particular country but closing it over such a broader area is in fact unprecedented.
The focus of U.S government should be on countries that require extreme security attention like Yemen and Egypt and not on the rest. The country itself is recovering from an extreme recession period, but the government, rather than fulfilling the needs of the people is spending excessive amount of money for securities of its embassies and consulates across the world.
During an interview to CNN State of the Union, Adam Schiff, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, stated that "We are doing this to protect our people". Without the knowledge of clear locations and exact timings of attack, it is tough to determine how the United States government is planning to protect the people. The lack of surety of timing of closure makes the decision even more questionable.
The country is repeating the same mistake it repeated 12 years ago, when the worst terrorist attack happened, killing thousands, destroying the World Trade Center in New York, damaging the Pentagon and shaking financial markets and businesses around the world. United States government needs to understand that the terrorist attacks can take place anywhere in the world including the United States itself. This is the reason why government needs to focus on their own security and have trust in the ability of other countries to provide the required security to the U.S Embassy and consulates across the world.
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