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. When the government is in shutdown mode, many government agencies are affected and people are told to stay home – without pay – and put on furlough (after previous government shutdowns, these people were paid retroactively for their time off work). All non-essential agencies are shut down ASAP.

As the migrant “caravan” approaches Tijuana, the Trump administration has been working to limit the amount of immigrants who can enter the US through asylum. In a presidential proclamation that was released on November 9, 2018, the wording makes it very clear that these new limits in the area of asylum are being specifically put in place to stop people who have been slowly making their way towards the US border.

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.

An unnamed top border US border official has confirmed that those who work in, or invest in the soon-to-be legal Pot trade in Canada will be treated like drug traffickers and risk being turned away at the border at the minimum or worse. While it might seem insane, any legal jobs involving cannabis in Canada — or even legal investing in the marijuana industry in Canada — will result in your being treated as a member of an illegal drug cartel by Customs and Border Protection.

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…

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 of immigration attorneys and advocates. In fact as many have said before, Obama, our “deporter in chief”  oversaw very aggressive detention and removal policy. He deported…

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 on petitions from previous immigrants, but this is the first time we really kind of see the whole scope of the problem…

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. 

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, and lack of resources (so they could) substantially undermine the intent of Congress,” specifically through the abuse of  the system set up for asylum seekers.