Immigration law is a constantly changing legal field. Immigration lawyer Harlan York provides this blog so you can stay up to date on how legal trends affect immigration law cases.
Whether your green card application is based on family, employment, visa lottery, political asylum or any other means, everyone must file a completed Green Card, or Immigration Medical Exam ( also known as an I-693, I693, or I 693 form) before approval. If you want to get a green card “fast” (and of…
This is my portion of a collaborative post with Jessica Tarlov that was published in its entirety on Fox News I’ve been an immigration lawyer for 23 yrs, and in that time I’ve seen many different approaches to our “border crisis”. Border crossings by immigrants without visas have occurred for…
It seems that in the current political climate, government shutdowns are an annual event. This leaves many of our clients asking: how does this impact our immigration case? For this and any future shutdowns, we have created a general list of what is affected, and what maintains the status quo….
With Christmas coming up, it is time once again for many countries in the world to lay claim to Santa Claus. The US has a Santa There is a real live Santa Claus (legal name) currently living in Alaska. He’s not deciding if anyone is naughty or nice, but he…
UPDATE: Trump has been temporarily blocked from banning asylum seekers. The request was made by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. We will update this post as this story progresses. As the migrant “caravan” approaches Tijuana, the Trump administration has been working to limit the…
Many of the great holiday traditions that we currently enjoy were brought to the United States by way of immigration, and Halloween is no different. Human fascination with death and the afterlife has long been part of our history, but the tradition of celebrating Halloween was originally started in Europe…
In a major turn around from my last post, Canadians working in the legal pot industry will be mostly admissible to the US without incident as long as they are coming into the States for reasons unrelated to the marijuana industry. Here is the latest CBP Statement on Canada’s Legalization…
With Canada on the precipice of a booming legal trade in marijuana, many Canadians and other immigrants are unaware that they could be risking a LIFETIME ban at the US border for their legal activities in their own country. An unnamed top border US border official has confirmed that those…
The New York Times just published an article entitled: Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration. That’s a pretty big statement, but it follows the logic of my recent blog post entitled: Immigrants Have a Positive Impact on the Economy, Why Are We Trying To Block Them? While the…
For many people, staying in the US can be a matter of life and death. Being deported could mean persecution in their own countries, torture, and/or death. But for many immigrants, extreme hardship means being forced to live without your family, children, spouse, or simply losing your access to financial stability…
President Trump has spent a great deal of time railing against immigrants, and working hard to stem the flow of immigration to the US. But when did anyone start to believe that immigration is a bad thing? From an economic perspective, immigrants bring so much to their host countries: they…
While immigration has been in the news fairly solidly since the Trump administration took the reigns, in the last few weeks we have entered a whole new era of previously unimaginable policies. Detaining children is nothing new. Under Obama the detention of children was met with outrage by a lot…
Back in college, I had a buddy whose mother mailed him a check so he could buy some new clothes. He promptly cashed it and bought some pizza. When I asked why he spent his parents’ hard earned money on food, he replied, “You can’t eat a shirt.” Interesting. Which…
It is Human Nature to search for help with a problem. Time was, you got out a phone book and called a plumber if your sink was clogged beyond belief. In those days, you certainly called a doctor if you were feeling really sick. And then came the Internet. All…
Detention centers are unpleasant places for everyone, but for pregnant women they can be particularly unforgiving. Horror stories abound in the news about women who have been denied medical care by ICE, even after complications such as miscarriages. Advocacy groups indicate that while detention of pregnant women by ICE was…
IMPORTANT NOTE: The Trump administration is ending TPS for a number of countries as part of efforts to restrict immigration and increase deportation. If you are from a country where you know TPS is ending soon, find an immigration lawyer and start looking for other more permanent options. DO NOT wait…
We spend a lot of time making assumptions about who is an immigrant, and what that means. The word ‘immigrant’ itself can have a negative connotation in certain circles. But why is that? Our country is made up of immigrants, even indigenous populations moved around the world before settling in…
Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants can breathe a sigh of relief this week as the Supreme Court refused to hear the administration’s appeal of a federal judge’s Jan. 9 injunction that halted Trump’s move to rescind the DACA program for Dreamers. If you are a young immigrant in the United…
We’ve been getting a lot of panicked phone calls lately from clients who have been granted their permanent residency, but whose green cards are expiring. To this I always answer: don’t panic. Unless you have a conditional 2-year green card, your permanent residency is…well…permanent. Even if your green card expires…
Anyone who reads these blog posts will see an ever-growing trend. Nearly 3 million deportation under Obama. (They have been calling it “removal” since 1997 but it’s the same thing). And since the Trump administration came into power, more people than ever walk around, afraid of deportation. But here’s the…
Once again President Trump has made US immigration policy front page international news this past week with his remarks about not wanting immigrants from what he described as “shithole countries”. While the language is shocking, the sentiment is one that has held a long place historically in US immigration policy….
Federal judge William Alsop in San Francisco has blocked Trump’s administration from ending DACA. Claiming that the move to rescind the program was based on “a flawed legal premise,” he ruled that the program must be left in place until the litigation to remove it has been decided. Dreamers’ lives…
Over the weekend Fox news published an article entitled: White House releases ‘explosive’ tally of green cards issued in ‘chain migration’. In this “Exclusive” about chain migration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Lee Cissna is quoted as saying: “For years, we’ve known that large numbers of immigrants have been coming based…
We have seen many changes in US immigration protocol since the Trump Administration came to power. These changes have affected young people through the cancellation of DACA, and more immigrants through the loss of prosecutorial discretion. As I have stated in recent lectures and other blog posts, the loss of…
Attorney General Jeff Sessions just had his Remarks to the Executive Office for Immigration Review published today. Sessions placed the blame for the US immigration problems firmly on the shoulders of “smart attorneys” who create “fraud and abuse in our asylum system” and “exploite(d) loopholes in the law, court rulings,…
