IMMpact Litigation, Apr. 25, 2024 "IMMpact Litigation, seeking redress for over 100,000 Ukrainian nationals paroled into the United States post-February 2022, today announces a significant advancement...
DOL, Apr. 26, 2024 "The Department of Labor today announced a final rule to strengthen protections for farmworkers . The rule targets vulnerability and abuses experienced by workers under the H...
NILA, Apr. 24, 2024 "The National Immigration Litigation Alliance (NILA) and Innovation Law Lab are thrilled to announce that, in response to the lawsuit we filed against the United States Citizenship...
NILA, Apr. 24, 2024 "Today, three immigration attorneys and two individuals filed a prospective class action lawsuit in federal court, challenging U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP...
USCIS, Apr. 23, 2024 "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) today announced the upcoming opening of international field offices in Doha, Qatar, and Ankara, Turkey, to increase capacity...
"With a growing number of immigrants asking for asylum at the border, Department of Homeland Security officials have set new guidelines that raise the bar on who can enter the United States and formally file for protection, according to documents released Thursday. The internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services documents, which were obtained by an advocacy group called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, pertain to what are known as "credible fear" interviews. Asylum officers conduct the interviews when a person subjected to expedited removal, such as a someone apprehended at the border, expresses an intention to apply for asylum or expresses a fear of harm if they return home. The officer determines whether the person is eligible for a full asylum hearing -- or should be sent home. Under the new guidelines, spelled out in a Feb. 28 memo from John Lafferty, the chief of the Asylum Division at USCIS, officers are instructed to approve only those immigrants who demonstrate a "significant possibility" of winning asylum from a judge. Lafferty wrote that the changes were made in light of concerns that officers had been approving cases that had "only a minimal or mere possibility of success." The agency has been overwhelmed with a surge of new credible fear applications driven largely by an influx from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Over the last five years, credible fear claims at the border have increased sevenfold, from just under 5,000 to more than 36,000. In his memo, Lafferty wrote that the number of credible fear referrals rose by more than 250% between fiscal year 2012 and 2013. He said the department conducted its review "in light of the increased allocation of resources devoted to credible fear adjudications and the attention on these adjudications."" - Kate Linthicum, L.A. Times, Apr. 17, 2014.