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Articles Posted in Citizenship and Naturalization

It has been reported that President-Elect Joe Biden will unveil a comprehensive immigration plan on his first day in office.  The plan, which would provide a multi-year pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, is expected to be sent to Congress on Wednesday, shortly after the inauguration.

The central tenet of Biden’s plan is the pathway to citizenship, which would allow certain undocumented immigrants to achieve citizenship within eight years. The plan, as reported, would give certain immigrants temporary status for five years, allow them to apply for green cards after that time and once they have met certain criteria, then allow them to apply for citizenship three years later.

For recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — so-called Dreamers who were protected under a program first started by President Barack Obama — the pathway would be streamlined, allowing them to apply for a green card immediately.

President-elect Joe Biden’s plans for immigration are expected to be a stark contrast to the Trump administration agenda.  Some of President-elect Biden’s stated priorities are:

  1. Reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA and Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

The Trump administration has relentlessly attached the DACA program.  President-elect Biden has promised to fully reinstate DACA and will seek to make its protections permanent.  President-elect Biden has also stated that he intends to review TPS designations to ensure people are not returned to unsafe countries.

On July 31, 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a final rule that will adjust fees for specific immigration and naturalization benefit requests to “ensure U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS] recovers its costs of services.” Unlike most government agencies, USCIS is fee funded and the announcement comes amid concerns about potential furloughs at USCIS due to a budgetary shortfall.

While filing fees for most applications will be increasing, the most notable increase is for naturalization (citizenship) applications.  The current USCIS filing fee for filing an N-400 Application for Naturalization is $640 (plus $85 for biometrics).  As of October 2, 2020, the USCIS filing fee will be increasing to $1,170 for paper filings (on-line filings are $10 less) – an increase of 83% !

If you have had your green card for at least five years, you may be eligible to naturalize if you have physically resided in the U.S. for at least half (2.5 years) of the preceding 5 years. Any trips outside of the U.S. for more than 6 consecutive months may break the continuous residency requirement unless you can prove that you were domiciled in the U.S. Any trips outside the U.S. for more than 12 consecutive months will definitely break the requirement.

On April 1, 2020, USCIS extended the temporary suspension of all routine face-to-face services with applicants at all USCIS offices, including all interviews, naturalization ceremonies, and biometric collection appointments through May 3, 2020.  USCIS offices will re-open on May 4 unless the public closures are extended further.

USCIS will reschedule all appointments when normal operations resume.

The immigration lawyers at Lubiner, Schmidt & Palumbo are accepting new clients and we are available to consult via video chat, including iphone, android and all other video conferencing services. We are also available for by appointment office consults. If you have any questions about your ability to file an immigration applications currently and how these closures would affect that, please do not hesitate to contact us.

People who are thinking about applying to naturalize as a U.S. citizen may want to fast track their decision. USCIS announced a series of changes in filing fees which, if approved, would take effect in 2020. Among the fee changes, naturalization applications will seeing the highest increase from $725 to $1,255 (including biometrics).

If you have had your green card for at least five years, you may be eligible to naturalize if you have physically resided in the U.S. for at least half (2.5 years) of the preceding 5 years. Any trips outside of the U.S. for more than 6 consecutive months may break the continuous residency requirement unless you can prove that you were domiciled in the U.S. Any trips outside the U.S. for more than 12 consecutive months will definitely break the requirement.

If you obtained your green card through marriage, you may be eligible to naturalize after you’ve been married for 3 years and have had your green card for 3 years. You must also meet the continuous residency requirement – in this case, 1.5 years in the preceding 3 years. If it has been fewer than 5 years since you got your green card and you are naturalizing based on marriage to a U.S. citizen, you will also have to provide proof that you are still married.

Last month, in the wake of the terrorist attack on a Berlin Christmas market, President-elect Donald Trump was asked by reporters if he was rethinking or reevaluating his plans to establish a registry for Muslim immigrants and temporarily ban Muslim immigrants from entering the United States.  The President-elect responded to the press’ inquiries, saying “You know my plans all along,” then went onto say that the recent attack, for which the Islamic State later claimed responsibility, had vindicated his proposed ban.

Muslims and advocates across the country have expressed anxiety at not quite knowing what Trump means when he says “Muslim ban.”  A year ago on the campaign trail, Trump said he wanted a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United Stated until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”  Later, Trump and his senior aide sought to soften the proposal, suggesting that he would support a ban on immigration only from countries that has been “compromised by terrorism.”  Six months ago in a “Meet the Press” interview, when asked whether he has rolled back his calls for a Muslim ban, Trump responded saying he had viewed it instead as an expansion of his initial proposal.  Today, the statement proposing a “complete shutdown of Muslim immigration remains on Trump’s website and the President-elect has yet to clarify how exactly he would address the issue as President.

Furthermore, senior Trump aide, Kellyanne Conway, stated that Mr. Trump would not seek to ban an immigrant based on religion, but rather would seek a ban pertaining to “what he said later about it when he made it much more specific and talked about countries where we know they have a higher propensity of training and exporting and in some cases harboring terrorists.”  Such mixed messages have left Muslim community leaders puzzled and apprehensive.  While many people have interpreted the Muslim ban as an intention on Trump’s part to revive the NSEERS system, the Bush-era registry used to track Muslims and Arabs, which was dismantled by President Obama, others believe the ban could involve more severe repercussions. 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is removing regulations relating to an obsolete special registration program created after 9/11 to track noncitizen men from predominantly Muslim countries.  NSEERS, which DHS has not used since 2011, has for many years been deemed redundant, used to capture data manually that was already captured through automated systems, nonetheless the structure has remained intact until now.  The program has been discontinued, for these reasons and for reasons pertaining to NSEERS’ inability to provide a discernible public benefit, as the program no longer provides an increase in security in light of DHS’s evolving assessment of the threat posed to the United States by international terrorism. 

In August 2002, less than a year after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) finalized the proposed program to require designated nonimmigrants to be fingerprinted and photographed and to provide additional biographical information.  The rule also authorized INS to designate certain ports of departure for nonimmigrants subject to the program.  The following months, INS announced by way of a Federal Register notice, that the new program would be applied to those who were subject to the earlier registration program (first established in 1991)—nonimmigrants from Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Sudan—and added nonimmigrants from Syria.  Between November 2002 and January 2003, INS added another 20 countries to the compliance list, bring the total to 25 countries.

Once the responsibility for administering NSEERS was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003 as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, DHS determined that automatically requiring 30-day and annual re-registration for designated nonimmigrants was no longer necessary.  Leading up to 2011, DHS began to utilize a more tailored system in which they would notify nonimmigrants subject to the program to appear for re-registration interviews where DHS deemed it necessary to determine whether they were complying with the conditions of their status and admission.

On November 29, 2016, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection implemented a requirement for all Chinese passport holders who carry a maximum validity (10 year) B1 (business) and/or B2 (pleasure) visa to have a valid Electronic Visa Update System (EVUS) enrollment before traveling to the United States.  Travelers using passports from Hong Kong, Macau SAR, Taiwan, or any other passport other than a Peoples Republic or China passport are not affected by the EVUS enrollment requirement.

The Electronic Visa Update System is the online enrollment system by which Chinese nationals holding B 1 and/or B 2 visas valid for 10 years update basic biographic information, enabling their travel to the United States.  Since the implementation of the EVUS requirement, nationals of China holding such 10-years visas will not be allowed to travel to the United Stated without valid EVUS enrollment. 

Earlier this year on October 20, 2016, the following rules and notices were published in the Federal Register, setting the general regulatory framework for EVUS and designating the first group that will be subject to the requirements.

Immigrants across the country are regularly denied bail or offered bail that’s too expensive.  Last Spring, news broke of a State Senator from Queens, New York, lobbying to scrap the obsolete bail bond system of holding people who could not afford bail, many of whom were immigrants, in jail before their trial.

State Senator Michael Gianaris, in an interview with Vice News, called the current regime of setting bail in New York “something left over from England in the Middle Ages.”  Now, California’s district courts are starting to take apart the same archaic bail-setting schemes that left so many disenfranchised New Yorkers in prison before they were proven guilty of the accused crime.

Unlike in criminal court, where those charged often hire bail bondsmen and only have to pay 10 percent of the total bail amount, immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE) often have to pay the full amount of a bond.  Most bond companies require collateral such as a house or a car, which many low income immigrants lack, resulting in a scarcity of bond companies geared toward immigrants.

To constituents, executive actions may seem like simple maneuvers—quick fixes to a discordant Supreme Court or a disagreeing Congress.  But to those who have held Presidential office, executive actions have shown themselves to be much more complex.  Each comes with its own set of statutorily or judicially imposed restraints.  Some actions are subject to modification or even revocation while others must comply with certain mandated procedures; all actions, though, fall subject to a lack of permanence and are often withdrawn just as swiftly as they were first put into place.

Most executive actions can be broken down into three basic categories:

  1. Executive orders, which are written directions issued by the incumbent President that govern actions of executive branch officials as well as government agencies
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