All posts by Cheng, Cho, & Yee, Immigration Lawyers

These Immigrants Have Left Their Mark in America

The successive waves of immigration to the United States have accelerated the course of progress in all aspects of American life including technology, science, books, movies, architecture, and economic productivity.

Albert Einstein

The father of modern physics, Albert Einstein was born in Germany in 1879. He was Jewish and immigrated to the U.S. for safety as the Nazis rose to power. Einstein is recognized as the greatest physicist in the world in the 20th century and was responsible for the theory of relativity and the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Sergey Brin

The co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin has had a major impact on modern life. Brin was born in Moscow in the former Soviet Union. Brin came from a Russian-Jewish family that decided to flee the USSR because of rising anti-Semitism when he was four years old. He met Larry Page while studying for his doctorate at Stanford. Together, they formed Google, which is the most popular search engine in the world.

Dikembe Mutombo

This famous retired NBA star was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and originally came to the U.S. to study medicine at Georgetown University on an academic scholarship. While he was at Georgetown, he tried out for the school’s basketball team and eventually landed in the NBA. Today, Mutombo serves as a humanitarian ambassador and does work around the globe to better the circumstances of people who live in poverty.

Ieoh Ming Pei

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in Guangzhou, China and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 17 years old to attend the University of Pennsylvania. Pei grew to become one of the world’s best-known architects and was responsible for designing the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

These are just a few of the many immigrants whose contributions have made the U.S. into the country it is today. Countless other immigrants have also made their mark even if they are not as well known.

Will Decades-Old Fingerprints Cause American Citizenship to be Rescinded?

Naturalized citizens in Illinois should be aware that the Trump administration is currently scanning old fingerprints from when people became citizens to catch immigrants who may have lied on their citizenship applications. The government is looking for people who had been deported and later reentered and gained citizenship under new identities. The administration has created a new task force of lawyers to find people that the government believes have lied on their applications so that the government can attempt to denaturalize them or strip them of their U.S. citizenship.

Effort Latest Hardline Move

The effort targeting U.S. citizens is the Trump administration’s latest hardline move against immigration. In the past, denaturalization has only been used in rare cases in which the people had committed fraud or serious crimes. Just 305 denaturalization cases have been filed by the Justice Department in the last 28 years. Thus far, 2,536 cases have been referred for in-depth review, and 95 have been referred by the United States Immigration and Customs Service to the Justice Department for possible denaturalization proceedings.

Who Could Be Affected?

Anyone who was previously deported and later gained citizenship without revealing the prior deportation or under a new identity could be denaturalized under the new push. The government is currently digitizing fingerprints from old cards collected from the 1990s. The fingerprints are entered for comparison into the Department of Homeland Security’s IDENT system to try to find people whose prints were collected during previous deportations to naturalized citizens whose prints were collected when they applied for naturalization. The government states that the denaturalization effort could potentially lead to thousands of citizens getting stripped of their citizenship statuses and then deported.

While the administration’s new efforts are targeted at immigrant citizens, it does not necessarily mean that everybody who is swept up by the task force will be denaturalized and deported. The administration does not ultimately decide who will lose their citizenship and be deported. If people are referred to the Justice Department for denaturalization efforts, they will be able to have hearings before immigration judges. The judges will ultimately be responsible for deciding whether people will be denaturalized and deported or allowed to retain their citizenship statuses and remain in the U.S.

Reunification of Parents and Kids Separated at the Border

The Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy for immigrants has resulted in the forcible separation of several thousand children from their parents, and 700 children still remain separated despite the fact that two court-ordered reunification deadlines have passed. A judge ordered the government to reunify the children with their parents by July 26, but the government failed to reunify hundreds. The government claims that it has reunified all of the children whose families were eligible for reunification and that the remaining parents were ineligible.

The Zero-Tolerance Policy

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the administration’s zero-tolerance policy in April. Under the policy, prosecutors were told to file criminal charges against all people who entered the country illegally. In the past, a majority of people went through a civil deportation process instead of criminal prosecution. With the mandated criminal prosecution of all undocumented immigrants, many families were forcibly separated from their children. The children were taken away from the parents because the parents were taken into custody. This resulted in several thousand children getting separated from their parents. Amid a widespread backlash, Trump announced an end to the family separations on June 20. A court then issued a nationwide injunction against family separations and ordered all of the children who had been separated to be reunified with their families by July 26. The separated children were placed in facilities across the U.S., including in Illinois.

Reunification Problems

Despite the deadline, the government did not reunify 700 children with their parents. The government argued that the children who were not reunified had parents who were not eligible for reunification. The government admitted that 431 of the children had parents who had been deported back to their home countries without their children. The court instructed the administration that its order covered families in which the parents had been deported and that the government needed to locate the parents so that they could be reunified with their children. The government also argued that some parents were deemed ineligible because of past criminal convictions or because they were deemed to be unsafe. Immigration attorneys have argued that separating the children from their parents causes extreme emotional harm to the children. Advocates for the deported parents are in Central America to help them to find their children.

What the Surge in H-2B Visas Could Mean for You

There have been far more H-2B visa applications than the number of visas that are available and, for many businesses, the lack of availability will cause irreparable harm. The annual cap for H-2B visas is 66,000. Unfortunately, the current allowance is inadequate to meet the demands of the growing economy. Without additional visas available, many businesses that depend on H-2B workers won’t be able to fill positions. As a result, they may be forced to turn away customers and reduce the level of work for American workers.

Surge in H-2B Visa Applications

H-2B visas are available for seasonal and temporary non-agricultural workers. Industries that rely on these workers include amusement parks, carnivals, construction, landscaping, production, and others. These businesses apply for H-2B visas so they can fill open positions with foreign workers. However, the U.S. Department of Labor announced in February that there had been an unprecedented surge in applications. Many companies that rely on foreign workers may be unable to fill their positions this year.

What Might Happen

Companies that are unable to find U.S. workers to fill their open positions often rely on the H-2B visa program to get the workers that they need. If they are unable to get enough visas, they may not be able to fill all of their open jobs. This could have a negative financial impact on the companies. In February, more than 100 trade groups joined together to send a letter urging Congress to raise the cap on H-2B visas. Congress is able to raise the cap but has not done so this year. According to the trade groups, the unavailability of enough H-2B visas jeopardizes small businesses everywhere. Seasonal and temporary workers help support many other jobs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that each H-2B worker creates and sustains about 4.64 American jobs

What Businesses Should Do

Employers that know they will need foreign workers next year should submit their H-2B visa applications as soon as possible once the application period opens. Applying early may make it likelier that a company will be able to get enough workers to fill all of their jobs during the next season. Some employers this year have turned to creative recruiting methods in an effort to attract more U.S. workers.

Over 60,000 Hondurans Must Find Other Paths to Remain in the US

The Department of Homeland Security announced it was ending the Temporary Protected Status of 60,000 Hondurans who have lived in the U.S. for nearly two decades and they have until January 5, 2020, to return to their country or find other paths to remain here. The immigrants will have one chance to apply for TPS and after the 18 month period allowed, they will be unable to live or work in the U.S legally and will be vulnerable to deportation.

Hondurans Become the Latest Group to Be Stripped Off of Protection

Hondurans were first allowed to remain and work here in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch hit their country, killing 7,000 people and causing billions in damages. The trump administration is stripping TPS from Honduran immigrants with claims that their country has recovered from the Hurricane and that the basis for TPS designation is no longer substantial. But critics who’ve already filed several lawsuits argue that Honduras is a place plagued by political repression and systemic gang violence and many are actually trying to flee.

The decision continues the administration’s aggressive campaign against immigrants. Several other beneficiaries have had their protection ended, including 20,000 El Salvadorans expected to leave by September 2019, 60,000 Haitians who must leave by July 2019; 5,300 Nicaraguans whose time runs out next January; and 9,000 Nepalis who have until May 2019. More than 400,000 people living in the country legally will have turned into unauthorized immigrants by 2020.

TPS serves as a form of humanitarian relief offered to individuals who fled their country in the aftermath of natural disasters, war, or other humanitarian crises where the conditions made their country unsafe. Ten countries are currently in the program. The beneficiaries are undocumented individuals with some form of temporary immigration status, those who overstayed a visa, or those were already in the country. Although meant to be temporary, previous administrations have continually extended the protection on a yearly basis and the beneficiaries have since established roots, raised families, and opened businesses here.

Hondurans who wish to remain in the United States through the 2020 deadline must re-register and apply for work authorization.