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COVID-19 developments, including the White House ban on green card applications made at US consulates abroad, economic changes, and reduced cross-border travel, reduced the volume of applications for immigrant visas in recent months, creating excess supply in employment-based (EB) immigrant quotas.

As a result, the US Department of State (DOS) adjusted the EB quotas to allow certain individuals who previously faced lengthy waits of up to multiple years to file for adjustment of status (AOS) to US permanent residency in the month of October 2020.Continue Reading Executive Summary: The Gate to US Permanent Residency Opens in October 2020

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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) has planned a series of nationwide raids this weekend to detain and remove thousands of undocumented immigrants, according to multiple national media reports. ICE officials have confirmed that agents will target at least 2,000 undocumented immigrants in at least 10 US cities for removal. In our Legal Update, we…

Central American Refugees, South Texas
A district court orders DHS to process all migrants reaching the U.S.-Mexico border, as 7,000 migrants, including women and children, reach Tijuana and San Diego.

A federal judge has barred President Trump’s recent asylum ban, now forcing the administration to accept all migrants crossing the southern border who seek protection, rather than limit asylum requests to U.S. ports of entry. As of last evening, Judge John Tigar of the U.S. District Court of Northern California issued a temporary restraining order…

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On September 27, the USCIS Office of Public Engagement hosted a live teleconference to inform the public how the agency will implement its new policy, or policy memorandum (PM), issued on June 28, 2018, “Updated Guidance for the Referral of Cases and Issuance of Notices to Appear (NTAs) in Cases Involving Inadmissible and Deportable Aliens.”  The policy aligns USCIS operations with Executive Order 13768: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.

The NTA requires the recipient to appear in court before an immigration judge, and is the first step in removal, or deportation, proceedings. After a brief overview of the new NTA policy, which supersedes previous 2011 USCIS guidance on the same topic, USCIS presented a Q&A series from more than 100 questions received by stakeholders. The USCIS teleconference participants represented a broad spectrum of the agency’s divisions including USCIS Field Operations, Policy, and Office of Chief Counsel.  USCIS also announced that the agency will soon host a public webpage about the new NTA policy implementation, and that information conveyed during the teleconference would soon be available in the USCIS electronic reading room.

The top 10 takeaways of the USCIS teleconference regarding its new NTA policy implementation include the following points:
Continue Reading Top 10 NTA Takeaways: USCIS Goes Live to Reveal Implementation Plans of New DHS Deportation Policy

As anticipated by an earlier blog post, and after a couple of months of internal planning, USCIS is ready to announce its implementation plan related to the agency’s new Notice to Appear (NTA) policy guidance.  On Thursday, September 27, Mayer Brown’s Global Mobility and Migration practice will eagerly join a live USCIS teleconference entitled…

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USCIS Broadens Categories for Deportation Under New Policy Guidance and Will Issue Notices of Appearance 

On June 28, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) issued new policy guidance that expands the circumstances under which an adjudicator will generate a Notice to Appear (NTA), a charging document that commences removal proceedings and the deportation process,…

Mayer Brown counsel Lisa Pino was quoted in an article featured in The California Lawyer Daily Journal discussing the uptick in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) worksite investigations, which have doubled since October 2017.  This increase aligns with the Trump Administration’s immigration policy priorities, published in late 2017, to hire 10,000 more ICE officers…