Maria Sacchetti, Washington Post, Dec. 8, 2023 "A federal judge in San Diego on Friday approved a settlement that prohibits U.S. officials from separating migrant families for crossing the U.S....
USCIS, Dec. 8, 2023 "The employment-based (EB) annual limit for fiscal year (FY) 2024 will be higher than was typical before the pandemic, though lower than in FY 2021-2023. We are dedicated to...
Elliot Spagat, Associated Press, Dec. 8, 2023 "A federal judge was poised Friday to prohibit separation of families at the border for purposes of deterring immigration for eight years, preemptively...
In an unpublished decision dated Dec. 4, 2023 a panel of the Ninth Circuit remanded for a new hearing. The facts are stunning...unless you practice immigration law: "Because Lead Petitioner credibly...
This document is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on 12/07/2023 "The Department of State (“Department”) is amending its regulation governing immigrant visas by removing...
TRAC, June 18, 2019
"The latest case-by-case records from the Immigration Courts indicate that as of the end of May 2019 one or more removal hearings had already been held for nearly 47,000 newly arriving families seeking refuge in this country. Of these, almost six out of every seven families released from custody had shown up for their initial court hearing. Usually multiple hearings are required before a case is decided. For those who are represented, more than 99 percent had appeared at every hearing held. See Figure 1. Thus, court records directly contradict the widely quoted claim that "90 Percent of Recent Asylum Seekers Skipped Their Hearings."
Under our current system, there is no legal requirement that immigrants actually receive notice, let alone timely notice, of their hearing. Given many problems in court records on attendance and in the system for notifying families of the place and time of their hearings, these appearance rates were remarkably high.
... There can be additional problems at the court's end. As of the end of May, TRAC's examination of court records showed that, symptomatic of the problem of families receiving timely hearing notice, there were nearly ten thousand "phantom" family cases on the court's books. These were cases entered into the Immigration Court's database system but with little information apart from a case sequence number. The date of the NTA, its filing date, charges alleged, and particulars on the family were all empty. Virtually all information on these phantom NTAs was blank - yet this is the same system used by court personnel to manage sending hearing notifications."