U.S. officials announced Monday a change to the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) process for Afghans in which applicants will need to file only one form so that applications can go through a single government agency, senior officials told reporters.
Beginning July 20, new applicants — some in the SIV pipeline — will no longer need to send a separate petition to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for special immigrant status, which means the complete process is now overseen by the State Department. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a joint statement, "This new streamlined process, which is part of our ongoing efforts to make the program more efficient, will help to eliminate barriers for applicants and reduce application times." After nearly 20 years of war, the U.S. and its allies left Afghanistan in August 2021, helping to evacuate more than 130,000 Afghans in the chaotic last weeks in Kabul. Many of those Afghans hoped for a life in the U.S. The SIV program, a decade-old special immigrant visa program, helps military interpreters and others who worked on government-funded contracts to move to the United States in a direct pathway to a permanent resident card, also known as green card. In a call with reporters, Biden administration officials said the changes can reduce processing times by "about a month." "We do anticipate that, at a minimum, this change in process will shave about a month off of the adjudication time, but even more importantly, I think, ease a great administrative burden on the visa applicant. So, the process from the U.S. government side can be eased by a month or potentially more. … It’ll be a lot easier for the applicants as well," a senior government official said. The call was held on background, and Biden officials asked to attribute answers to senior administration officials. Representatives from the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services answered the questions from members of the media. Biden officials said there are 74,274 applicants in the SIV pipeline, excluding spouses and children. Of those, 10,096 principal applicants have already received the chief of mission approval — a crucial step in the SIV application. Including family members of those who have received that approval, a senior government official said they estimate 45,000 to 50,000 SIV recipients. Jose Martin Hercules Aleman had to show up to immigration court alone, twice. He remembers feeling fearful, appearing in front of a judge without any legal representation by his side for two removal hearings, once in mid-March and again in April.
“It’s really scary because you don’t know what you should respond,” Hercules Aleman, 36, said in a phone interview from detention. “You don’t know anything.” Hercules Aleman, who is from El Salvador, has been in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania for about four months. What Hercules Aleman didn’t know when he arrived was that there was a network of state-funded New Jersey immigration legal providers searching through every avenue they could to find people like him to represent. He lived in New Jersey before being picked up by ICE and taken out of state, so he qualifies for a state-funded program that represents immigrants in detention or deportation proceedings. ICE is moving New Jersey immigrants like Hercules Aleman – who face charges in criminal or family court – to out-of-state immigration detention facilities. But the agency is usually not notifying the group of immigration legal providers funded by the state to represent these detained immigrants. The situation also makes it challenging for immigrants to resolve their charges in criminal or family court from outside of New Jersey, advocates say, and even to access public defenders. Without resolving other charges, immigrants are more likely to be denied immigration relief and released on bond, limiting the possibility for them to travel to New Jersey to deal with their other cases. In immigration court, the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply. Priscila Abraham, a Detention Fellow with the Rutgers Immigrant Rights Clinic, said that ICE and immigration courts do not look “favorably” on an individual who has pending criminal cases. “So we’re kind of caught in this [catch] 22 where we’re trying to resolve these cases without ICE cooperating with us,” Abraham said. So if an immigrant goes into ICE custody with criminal charges pending, said Susannah Volpe, an assistant deputy public defender at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, “you have a really hard time proving that you’re not a danger to other people in the community, because those charges can be assessed in sort of the totality of the evidence–even though in the criminal case, you’re innocent until proven guilty.” Immigrant advocates and elected officials have asked ICE to provide more information about individuals the agency is moving to out-of-state facilities. But ICE has repeatedly denied these requests, according to emails from immigration legal providers and an ICE official, and people familiar with these communications. In its policy on transfers, ICE says it is not required to notify family members “or other third parties” of a transfer. If a detained immigrant has an attorney registered with the court, ICE will notify the attorney, the policy says. But many of the individuals taken out of New Jersey do not yet have an immigration attorney on record, advocates said, so it becomes difficult to locate those who need representation. “These are our New Jersey community members and residents, and they might not know about us until it’s too late,” said Raquiba Huq, the Chief Attorney for the Immigration Representation Project at the Legal Services of New Jersey (LSNJ). Emilio Dabul, a spokesperson for ICE, said that the agency adheres to its transfer policy, and takes into consideration “immediate family, attorney of record, and status of removal proceedings.” “Due to operational security, ICE does not announce and/or discuss projected transportation operations,” Dabul said. Hercules Aleman had been living in New Jersey since 2008, he said, and was detained by ICE in early March after he faced criminal charges of simple assault and violation of a domestic violence restraining order, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents and New Jersey court documents his immigration attorney shared with Documented. The attorney said the charges were related to a fight with his landlord. The charges were downgraded and transferred to family court. Hercules Aleman was convicted of a separate simple assault charge in 2019, and sentenced to a year of probation, including an anger management program, according to court documents. He has also faced a list of other criminal charges in the past — involving simple assault, criminal mischief, and theft — which were dismissed, according to the DHS documents. In 2016, he was also arrested by the Woodbrige, New Jersey police department for assault by auto, though there is no disposition for the charge, according to DHS documents. Once ICE moved Hercules Aleman to detention in Pennsylvania, it created additional barriers for him to resolve these separate cases. He likely spent extra time in detention than necessary because he could not find the New Jersey pro-bono representation program until a month and a half in, his attorney said, and showed up to immigration court removal dates alone. He still has not been able to access a lawyer for his case in family court, and was denied immigration bond at a May 25th bond hearing while his other charges were still pending, according to his attorney. Hercules Aleman said when he was taken into immigration detention in early March, he was given a sheet of paper that listed attorneys, but none of them answered his calls. Eventually, a friend inside the detention center who lived in New Jersey shared the number for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a group that provides pro-bono legal representation for New Jersey immigrants, he said. Now, Hercules Aleman is giving the AFSC hotline number to others in detention, where he said many people are struggling to find attorneys. “For all the new people who are arriving here, the situation is frustrating,” he said. “The days and the weeks pass, and the lawyers that [ICE] give you don’t answer. And then from there you start asking friends if they know any lawyers.” Last year, after a lengthy push by advocates and elected leaders in New Jersey, county jails stopped holding detained immigrants for ICE. Since then, ICE has been transporting New Jersey residents to detention facilities out of state. In August of 2021, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill that would prevent new or renewed contracts for immigration detention in the state. The Elizabeth Detention Center is the only immigration detention center that remains in New Jersey. It is a privately-owned facility which mostly holds migrants who have recently crossed through the southern border. New Jersey residents are usually only processed there briefly before being moved out of state, immigration legal providers said. Many immigrants, like Hercules Aleman, are now being detained at the Moshannon facility, hundreds of miles away from their New Jersey homes, according to various legal providers, cutting off their access to resolve charges in criminal or family court in-person, and making it challenging to connect with immigration groups that are state-funded to represent them. “ICE understands that detainees may have ties to the community and a support network near the location that they are detained,” said Dabul, the ICE spokesperson. “ICE takes that into account when moving to a new facility to keep them as close as possible to their support network.” Before three county jails shut their doors to ICE last year, the agency shared information with specific legal providers about the immigrants who were arriving in detention at the Hudson County jail, and the Essex County jail more recently, allowing these attorneys to locate people they were funded to represent, said Huq, of LSNJ. This information included lists of names and A-numbers, or partial A-numbers, which the government assigns to every person in immigration proceedings, and providers can use to locate immigrants in detention. LSNJ is part of a coalition of four groups that have been allocated money in the New Jersey Governor’s budget since 2018 to provide immigration legal services for state residents facing detention, deportation, or both. The coalition is called the Detention and Deportation Defense Initiative (DDDI), and includes LSNJ, AFSC, the Rutgers Immigrant Justice Clinic and the Seton Hall Law School Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic. But now, providers say that ICE has largely stopped providing the information that they used to locate potential clients, ever since the county jails stopped holding detained immigrants. The agency still gives attorneys information about immigrants who are staying long-term at Elizabeth Detention Center, but that group does not usually include New Jersey residents, Huq said. Funds have been specifically allocated in the state budget for DDDI providers to represent immigrants in deportation proceedings. But providers are still receiving this money to represent detained immigrants who they now may not be able to find. “We don’t know how big the scope of the problem is, because we have no official way of knowing how many people they’re detaining out of state,” said Jordan Weiner, Hercules Aleman’s attorney at AFSC. Last year, shortly after Essex and Bergen stopped holding people in ICE detention, LSNJ had heard “informally” that about ten people a week were being apprehended by ICE in New Jersey, Huq said, and sent to detention out of state. But the group has not received any updated information since then. An immigration adviser has been censured, fined and temporarily banned from getting another licence after "deliberately deceiving" an overstayer and her family into thinking her visa application was in hand.
Christopher Mark McCarthy took $4000 from a client in 2018, who wanted to help her daughter-in-law's legal status in New Zealand. The daughter-in-law, who cannot be named, has now overstayed for several years, all the while thinking that steps had been taken to advance her case for getting the right visa. The Immigration Advisers Complaints and Disciplinary Tribunal said McCarthy's actions amounted to "serious misconduct", after he had deliberately deceived his client into believing that a request for a visa had been made to Immigration New Zealand, when it hadn't been. The deception over about 18 months has resulted in serious consequences for the complainant's daughter-in-law, who was already unlawfully in New Zealand at the time McCarthy was hired. "The longer the daughter-in-law was in New Zealand unlawfully, the more difficult it became to regularise her situation," the Tribunal said. The woman and her partner, on whose behalf the action was taken, are now uncertain about their future. McCarthy was a licensed immigration adviser until April this year when his licence expired. He was also director of a business which specialised in immigration. The complainant and her son engaged McCarthy in about December 2017 to help the complainant's daughter-in-law with her endeavours to get the appropriate visa. Four months later McCarthy wrote to the complainant, recording his instruction to seek a visa. The complainant then paid him his requested fee of $4,025. A year later McCarthy advised the complainant's son, following email exchanges, that he was reviewing the evidence and putting together the section 61 visa request. In October 2019, with no news of progress, the son was told by McCarthy there had been no update, but he would be in touch again soon. The tribunal said in its decision that McCarthy appeared to have stopped communicating with the family in November 2019. "The family continued to ask him about the status of the request they thought had been made to Immigration NZ. This went on until 27 February 2021. There was no reply from him." In April 2021 the son contacted Immigration NZ and was told that his wife's visa had expired in March 2006 and no section 61 request had been made. The largest migrant caravan of the year set off toward the U.S.-Mexico border last week, coinciding with a regional summit where President Joe Biden announced changes to American immigration policy.
By Saturday, Mexican authorities announced they had issued 7,000 temporary documents and travel visas, and reported that the caravan had largely dispersed — however, the majority are still attempting to cross the border into the U.S., according to The Associated Press. What’s driving the news: Migrant caravans are a common way for people fleeing violence in South and Central America to travel north. Though the caravans themselves are usually broken up before they reach points of entry, many of the migrants eventually apply for asylum at the U.S. border. Despite claims that the caravan was dispersed, reports indicate that thousands of migrants will be traveling north in the coming weeks. Here’s what we know:
The leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were not invited, a high-profile source of controversy that led to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador refusing to attend. Here are some key takeaways from the summit:
Rohit Kumar, 30, hailing from West Bengal, is charged with six counts of submitting false and fraudulent immigration documents and six counts of committing aggravated identity theft, United States Attorney Philip Sellinger announced on Thursday.
An Indian national has been indicted for immigration documents fraud and aggravated identity theft, a US attorney said. Rohit Kumar, 30, hailing from West Bengal, is charged with six counts of submitting false and fraudulent immigration documents and six counts of committing aggravated identity theft, United States Attorney Philip Sellinger announced on Thursday. Each count of immigration documents fraud is punishable by a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, as well as a maximum fine of USD 250,000. Each count of aggravated identity theft is punishable by a sentence of two years in prison, which must be served consecutively to any other term imposed, as well as a maximum fine of USD 250,000. According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court, Kumar worked for several years in India for one of the largest information technology companies in the world. This IT company contracted with an electric utility company that was based in New Jersey and owned and operated nuclear power facilities at multiple locations, including in southern New Jersey. Under the contract, the IT company supplied services to the New Jersey company, including through the use of foreign national workers from India who worked in specialised occupations, the documents stated. |