U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced the agency will celebrate Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, observed on Sept. 17, with over 260 naturalization ceremonies across the country. Approximately, 45,000 lawful permanent residents will become America’s newest citizens during the annual commemoration honoring the signing of the U.S. Constitution 231 years ago on Sept. 17, 1787. View the list of 2018 Constitution Week naturalization ceremonies. USCIS has experienced a sustained 25 percent increase in the number of naturalization applications over the last two fiscal years on average. In FY 2017 USCIS naturalized more than 716,000 individuals. USCIS is on pace...
On September 11, 2018, USCIS began applying a new policy to allow the USCIS adjudicators discretion to deny a request for an immigration benefit without first issuing a Request for Evidence (RFE) or a Notice of Intent to Deny (NOID). The new policy will allow for USCIS to deny an application or petition without giving the applicant or petitioner the opportunity to correct a simple filing error. USCIS will also deny a benefit if any of the required initial evidence is missing from the filing. Prior USCIS policy limited an adjudicator’s ability to deny a case without first giving the...
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas – Brownsville Division on Friday, August 31, 2018, issued an unexpected reprieve for the DACA program which will continue to operate for now. The decision was issued almost exactly a year after President Donald Trump opted to end the DACA program. U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen decided not to issue a ruling that would have immediately blocked DACA's continuation. Texas and the other plaintiff states were asking the court to halt the operation of DACA, a program that has been ongoing for more than six (6) years. Judge Hansen...
Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order in NAACP v. Trump on Friday August 18, 2018 that partially stays its original order for the full restoration of the DACA program as to new DACA applications and applications for advance parole, but not as to renewal applications. The order simply means that no new DACA applications and applications for advance parole will be accepted by USCIS for processing, but renewal applications can continue to be submitted for adjudication.
WASHINGTON –The Internal Revenue Service today (August 22, 2018 ) announced a new format for individual tax transcripts that will redact personally identifiable information from the Form 1040 series to better protect taxpayer data. This new transcript replaces the previous format and will be the default format available via Get Transcript Online, Get Transcript by Mail or the Transcript Delivery System for tax professionals as of September 23, 2018. Financial entries will remain visible, which will give taxpayers and third-parties the data they need for tax preparation or income verification.
The U.S. Army has halted the purge of foreign born soldiers who were recruited through a program known as Military Accessions Vital to National Interest ( MAVNI) that offers citizenship to skilled immigrants in exchange for military service. The recent expulsion policy that abruptly discharged dozens of recruits from the Service is the Army’s effort to curtail a program that its leaders say poses a security risk. The Army ordered the halt to the discharges in a memorandum dated July 20, 2018 after a handful of the discharged recruits sued in federal court, prompting widespread media coverage of the purge...
The Trump administration failed again to convince a federal judge that there’s a legitimate reason to rescind legal protections for hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and seek to avoid deportation. U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington said last Friday, August 3, 2018, that a second attempt by the Department of Homeland Security to offer a "rational explanation" for the agency’s decision had fallen short. "The court simply holds that if DHS wishes to rescind the program -- or to take any other action, for that matter -- it must...
According to a recent report by researchers at Syracuse University immigrants in the state of New York state have the greatest likelihood of engaging a lawyer and the lowest rate of deportation orders of any state with an immigration court, The school's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) examined government data for all immigration court cases between February 2002 and February 2018 and noted that 74 percent of cases in New York State had attorneys, and just 28 percent received removal or deportation orders. Susan Long, a statistics professor and co-director of TRAC, said it's no coincidence that New York, with...
This week ( JUNE 26, 2018) , the Supreme Court upheld the third, reengineered version of President Trump's travel and entry ban by a vote of 5 to 4. .The court dismissed the anti-Muslim statements of President Trump and other administration officials when evaluating the legality of the ban. President Trump signed Executive Order (EO) 13769, "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States" just one week after the inauguration, on January 27, 2017, imposing a travel and entry ban on foreign nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The ban was eventually enjoined...
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday ending the process of separating children from families after they are detained crossing the U.S. border illegally. Until Wednesday, the federal government repeatedly argued the only way to end the practice was for Congress to pass new legislation. Trump also wrongly claimed prior to today that his administration had no choice but to separate families apprehended at the border because of federal law and a court decision. The executive order is a complete U turn of that policy. Trump said his order would not end the “zero-tolerance” policy that criminally prosecutes all...
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