Immigration Forum / USA Marriage Base / October 2006

To be fair not everyone ought to require the services of an immigration
lawyer simply to be reunited with their families.  The immigration law
is horrible, there is too much discretion without review.... if the IRS
started acting as the INS, I mean USCIS, there would be an uproar.
While perhaps the non-USC family member has no "rights" under US law, I
believe very strongly that the USC member(s) do have every right to
respect clear and timely action AND advice from USCIS.

Thanks for the feedback.

How is it confusing?  Is it that you didn't know how rampant family
separation can be or the English is not clear or like you mentioned,
would just like to have more details on the stories?

Obviously it is impossible to include all the details in a short
paragraph.  We are trying to link to published articles with more
information, where available.

Perhaps if the US government gave its citizens a decent civic education,
hell, a decent education in general....

This process does NOT have to be as hard as it is!  There will always be
some people who underestimate the difficulty of any task and complain,
but when the task is Herculean who doesn't?

Given your statements here, especially since I have already posted some
articles with the specific examples you asked about, I doubt there is a
rational discussion possible here.  I am posting this reply for others
who might come upon this thread in the future so that it may possibly
foster enlightenment and perhaps catalyst change rather than
entrenchment.

I won't copy all the stories here, just a few from these 2 articles,
there are many, many more - most not published. But each one is a
personal story of how the IIRIRA law passed in 1996 enacted one strike
laws against immigrants including LPRs, that were not enforced as much
until after 9/11 when any chance to throw out a non-citizen became fair
game.  No matter when the conviction happened, no matter the person had
already paid their fine or their time even long before 1996, no matter
that they had a wife or husband, children or grandchildren.  One strike
and you're out.

The option of a waiver is a very subjective thing.  Depending on the
geography where it is filed and the mood of the person reviewing can
mean the difference between a 90% approval rating for waivers and a 20%
approval rating.  That is not equal protection, that is something quite
different.  To say nothing of the expense in money, time and family
hardships involved.

In our own case, it is a very long story.  Going on 5 years now.  What
we paid is priceless, and all because of abuse of discretion, mistake of
fact and mistake of the laws.  But there is no one with authority to
take responsibility to do the right thing.  They can keep passing it on
to someone else until we expire.

From this article, already linked to above:
http://americanfamiliesunited.com/forum/index.php?topic=111.0

" So when Gill [The 82-year-old farmer]—a legal resident with a green
card—went as the last member of his family to apply to become a U-S
citizen, the government's response came as a shock to his son Harry.
“I was in the office,” says Harry. “My wife called me and she said
you know what? Dad got a deportation letter. And I said what?"

The reason? Something that happened here 15 years ago, at a gas station
the family owns that was plagued by drug dealers. [...]Gurdev Gill was
fined and given probation for possessing a loaded firearm, never serving
a day in jail. That was in 1991. And at the time, the incident would not
have affected Gill's status in this country. But now, 15 years later,
the government claims that old misdemeanor makes him a dangerous man who
should be deported."

and this one:

"21-year-old Sam Nhek, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after
his Cambodian mother barely escaped the infamous “killing fields”
that claimed his father’s life. Sam was a year old when they legally
settled in the U.S., where his mom remarried and he grew up as a typical
Southern California kid.

But one day he went joyriding in a stolen car with a friend and wound up
serving time in jail for possession of stolen property. Because Sam
wasn’t eligible for citizenship until he turned 18—and was therefore
still a green card holder and not a U.S. citizen—that joyriding
offense is about to get him deported. "

"Joren Lyons of San Francisco's non-profit Asian Law Caucus complains
that the law doesn't take any personal factors into account. “Once the
case has been filed,” says Lyons, “the immigration judges themselves
have no discretion at all.”

From this article:
http://americanfamiliesunited.com/forum/index.php?topic=83.0

"James (not his real name) is a businessman. He is 62 and he now lives
in the English Home Counties. But he ought to be living in America, with
his wife, children and grandchildren. For 15 years, he ran a company in
the US. He met and married an American woman, and lived in Virginia. The
couple have eight children, two of them adopted from Vietnam. They also
cared for two grandchildren when their daughter suffered depression.

Now James is an exile, unable to see his family. He is a victim of a US
law introduced on a wave of anti-immigrant feeling eight years ago and
now ruthlessly enforced in post-9/11 America. This law makes no
distinction between a youthful misdemeanour and murder, between white-
collar fraud and terrorism. It can have you expelled from the US as a
"criminal alien" for a minor offence committed two or three decades ago;
it converts a conviction for petty theft, minor assault or shoplifting
into a much more serious charge of aggravated felony requiring
deportation. "

"83-year-old Frenchman - guilty of a long-forgotten minor offence - was
put on a plane back to Paris after living in the US for 52 years. He had
been held for seven months and was deported even though he had nowhere
in France to go. As a result of the deportation, he lost all his US
social security benefits."

"In Georgia, Mary Anne Gehris, a mother of two children, one of them
suffering from cerebral palsy, faced deportation to Germany. She did not
even speak the language. She had been adopted in Germany when she was
two weeks old and taken to the US by her American parents. Her "crime"
was a conviction for misdemeanour battery - punished with a one-year
suspended sentence and 60 hours of community service - after a hair-
pulling scuffle with a boyfriend.

It was only when she applied for US citizenship (her parents, though
themselves US citizens, had never got round to taking it out for her)
that the offence came to the attention of the Immigration and
Naturalisation Service (INS). On the form, she gave an honest answer to
a question about previous convictions."

You can read more about IIRIRA 1996 here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IIRIRA