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The Golden Door

News and views on immigration law

Posts Tagged ‘U.S. citizenship’

Expungements: What you need to know before you expunge.

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

For most people who acquire a minor criminal record that conviction becomes both a professional and a personal thorn in their side.  On the career-side, having a criminal record can make landing a job more difficult or might prevent you from doing the work you want to do altogether, whether that’s lawful on the employer’s part or not.  On the personal side, you may feel ashamed that you have this record that shows that you broke the law, or were convicted of breaking the law, and having to explain it whenever it comes up.

After experiencing the ramifications of having a criminal conviction, most people want to eliminate this from their record if they can, which usually means requesting that the record be expunged.  Expungement means that the record is destroyed, and anyone looking up your name in the jurisdiction in which it the record was generated should come up empty-handed.  Once an expungement petition is granted, the court administrator (usually the clerk of courts) where the record was originally generated should notify any other agencies to which the criminal record was sent, requesting that this information be removed from those databases as well.  In reality, such requests may or may not be made by the original keeper of the records, and the other agencies that received the criminal record information may or may not update their files in a timely manner, so information about your conviction may still show up in other databases, such as the FBI database.

In terms of immigration, before you expunge your record you should know this:  USCIS and the federal immigration courts often require that you disclose whether you have ever been arrested or detained by a law enforcement officer, charged with a criminal offense, convicted, and what your sentence was if you were convicted.  They require this information regardless of whether the record has been expunged.  And they expect you to provide certified records of these events, or a statement from the relevant agency stating that no record is available.

This means that once you record has been expunged there is no way for the record-keeping agency to issue you a certified copy of that record.  And, not infrequently, when you then request a statement that the record is no longer available due to expungement, the agency may not comply with this request for various reasons, including not understanding the request, or due to a policy of declining to verify the prior existence of a record that has been expunged.

Then you are stuck.  You have admitted to immigration authorities (in the course of, for example, applying for citizenship or for cancellation of removal) to having a criminal record, as the law requires, and yet you cannot provide verification of what happened, also as required.  It is because of this conundrum that I often advise clients to delay having their criminal records expunged until after they become naturalized.  A “clean” criminal record procured through the expungement process can be a headache in immigration proceedings because of the requirement to disclose ALL, even expunged criminal records.

This is an example of when consulting an attorney earlier rather than later is the wiser course of action.  Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know!  Sometimes a consult early on the process can alert you to potential pitfalls before you commit them.  At Tran Law Associates, we aim to make the immigration process as painless as possible, including warning you of actions that may negatively impact your application for benefits.

 

Rumblings of immigration reform…

Friday, February 1st, 2013

I just read through the “Bipartisan Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” put together by a group of eight U.S. Senators, and the White House’s four-point platform on immigration reform, both statements which are (deliberately, no doubt) fairly similar in substance.

My first impression:

Good things:  both statements agree that (1) there should be a route for non-criminal unauthorized immigrants to obtain lawful status, including making amends for their unlawful actions such as paying back taxes and paying a fine; (2) our immigration system should permit individuals who have received advanced educational degrees in the United States to stay here without first getting an employer to sponsor them, thus freeing them to start businesses rather than rely upon an employer-sponsor for their status; (3) children brought to the United States without knowingly violating our immigration laws – commonly referred to nowadays as DREAMers – will face a less onerous route to obtain their permanent resident status than their parents; and (4) immigrant agricultural workers who have been paid “subsistence wages” should be granted permanent resident status, as there simply are not enough American workers for these agricultural jobs, and granting these workers permanent resident status would make them less vulnerable to exploitation by employers.

There seems to be a recognition running through the Senators’ framework that unauthorized immigrant workers are easily exploited by unscrupulous employers and thus granting these workers lawful status will, among other things, help build up stronger labor protections for workers in general.  (Of course, that brings us to a separate debate on business competitiveness when industries have to compete with overseas workers with weaker labor protection movements.)

Bad things:  The Senators’ framework makes permanent resident status for unauthorized immigrants contingent on “securing our borders and combating visa overstays.”  This statement raises the question of when will our borders be considered secure “enough”?  Another point made in the Senators’ statement restricts this class of “lawful probationary immigrants” from accessing federal public benefits, which means that while this class of immigrants would be required to pay taxes and thus fund these benefit programs they will not be able to access them when in critical need of social services.  This will create a new class of persons, with less rights than citizens or legal permanent residents.  Sounds complicated, and ripe for adverse unintended consequences.

Some of the points stated in these platforms sound great on paper but the real question is how they will be executed, such as:  Prohibit racial profiling; create an effective entry-exit tracking system so that we will know when someone who entered on a valid visa fails to depart on schedule; and provide “businesses with the ability to hire lower-skilled workers in a timely manner.”  I would love to see the “timely” part of that statement turn into reality.  Will timely mean a month?  Six months?  A year?  Two years?

The issue that faces one of the biggest implementation hurdles is creating an effective employment verification system.  As an immigration lawyer, it is difficult for me to sometimes identify the immigration status of the person in my office who has brought me all their immigration documents, and sometimes immigration officers themselves have a hard time, even with government databases at their fingertips.  The E-Verify system currently in place to verify employment authorization does not stop incorrect verifications through identity theft.  The Senators’ platform calls for an identity-theft-proof system.  A tall order.

Overall, a good start to the debate over what should be changed in our immigration system.  We’ll see where it goes from here.

Selective Service and Naturalization

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

For men applying to become American citizens, an issue that often crops up is whether the applicant registered for Selective Service, the registration system for military-aged men so that they can be conscripted into military service if the draft is ever re-instated.

Male U.S. citizens (“USCs”) and legal permanent residents (“LPRs”) born after December 31, 1959, are required to register between the ages of 18 and 26.  But it’s not only USCs and LPRs who are required to register, but also certain seasonal agricultural workers here on temporary visas, refugees and asylees, and undocumented immigrants.

So, the United States government requires not only its citizens, but also undocumented immigrants, to register for a potential draft.  Being drafted would mean being forced to join the U.S. military and fight for America in time of war.  The first question that pops into my mind when considering this scheme is:  “Do we really want men without allegiance to the U.S. fighting in our military?”  The second question is: “So, we expect undocumented immigrants, who are currently being particularly demonized and whose already limited rights are being further restricted by anti-immigrant factions, to fight and be prepared to die for the U.S.?”  The third question is:  “Why on earth would an undocumented immigrant, who constantly lives life under the radar of government authorities, register for Selective Service and risk deportation?”

For immigrants eligible to naturalize, which means someone with at least three years, and usually five years, of legal permanent residency, some then face the hurdle of having not registered for Selective Service when required under the law to do so.  For a man who was once an undocumented immigrant but later obtains legal permanent residency, he then must under the letter of the law explain why he didn’t register for Selective Service.  Most applicants didn’t realize that this requirement existed at the time that they were supposed to register, and this good faith ignorance is usually accepted as a valid excuse for failure to register.  But, if the examiner decides to disbelieve the good faith ignorance excuse then this is a valid basis for denial of the naturalization application.

Should we deny a man U.S. citizenship after he has earned his legal residency; been a law-abiding member of society; and learned the basics of our history, politics, and legal system, often better than those born here, because when he was undocumented he chose not to register for Selective Service and therefore expose himself to deportation?  Especially given that the purpose of Selective Service is to identify men to conscript into military service for a country for which, at the time, the applicant had so few rights that he could be held in almost indefinite “detention” (read, “imprisonment”) without the right to free legal counsel, without the protections of criminal defendants against search and seizure, and yet he was widely dubbed a “criminal” and treated as a criminal.  In the balance, I feel that even a willful failure to register for military conscription for someone whose rights and options were already so limited should not be a bar to naturalization.

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U.S. citizenship by birth, abroad

Friday, May 6th, 2011

A Catch-22 situation surfaced in my practice recently.  A man applying to renew his license to carry a concealed firearm (“CCF”) in Philadelphia was asked by Philadelphia Police to produce proof of his immigration status, since he was born abroad.  I’ll call him the Applicant.  The Applicant produced his valid U.S. passport, but this evidence was deemed unacceptable proof of his citizenship because the CCF permit application specifically states that “foreign-born” applicants must produce their naturalization documents, and “passports are not acceptable.”  (See Item 3.f.)

However, although the Applicant was born abroad — meaning not in the United States or any of its territories or possessions — he was also born a U.S. citizen.  Under the immigration law in effect at the time of his birth, and under the specific circumstances of his situation (I won’t bore you with the details but, if you’re interested, you can read the relevant statutory section, § 201(g), here), he meets the legal requirements for acquiring U.S. citizenship at birth and retaining that status.  As the Applicant was a U.S. citizen at birth he does not have a certificate of naturalization, just his U.S. passport.  In fact, it is impossible for him to legally obtain a certificate of naturalization , as he is already a U.S. citizen.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s application for CCF therefore now excludes, presumably inadvertently, an entire subset of U.S. citizens from obtaining a CCF permit.  It provides for legal permanent residents, and U.S. citizens born in the U.S., and naturalized U.S. citizens, to obtain a CCF permit.  But it fails to recognize that a person can be a U.S. citizen at birth — not a naturalized citizen — while born abroad.  Being born abroad of a U.S. citizen parent or parents is not an uncommon occurrence.  Examples of children of U.S. citizens commonly born abroad are the children of U.S. diplomats and other U.S. government employees, including the children of U.S. military personnel.  Even Americans who are not in the employ of the U.S. government have children abroad due to a variety of reasons and, based on the U.S. citizenship status of one or both parents, the child can still be a U.S. citizen.

Upon being informed of the fact that a person can be born a U.S. citizen abroad, the Philadelphia Police Department asked the Applicant to obtain a certificate of citizenship but did not guarantee that the certificate would be sufficient to meet the immigration status documentation requirements of the CCF application.  Obtaining a certificate of citizenship costs $600 for the filing fee.  The CCF application is $25.

What I don’t understand is why a U.S. passport is not valid proof of citizenship, whether naturalized or acquired at birth.  A U.S. passport is acceptable proof of citizenship, absent any contrary evidence, for the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), and all the immigration-related agencies under the aegis of DHS.  For example, on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) website, a search for “proof of U.S. citizenship” turns up this page.  The Social Security Administration accepts passports as proof of U.S. citizenship.  The Department of State accepts passports as proof of U.S. citizenship.  If I had more time, I would list more federal agencies that accept U.S. passports as valid proof of U.S. citizenship.  And yet, for some reason, passports are not good enough to establish U.S. citizenship for the Philadelphia Police Department’s Gun Permit unit.

Hopefully, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Gun Permit unit will revise its procedures so that it no longer inadvertently excludes U.S. citizens at birth born abroad from carrying, or requires them to spend an extra $600 to produce extraneous evidence of citizenship with no guarantee that this will be deemed satisfactory evidence.  One ironic side effect of this policy is that U.S. legal permanent residents and naturalized citizens are placed in a more beneficial category than those born to a U.S. diplomat or U.S. military personnel serving our country.

I’m still awaiting a concrete response.  I’ll post an update if I get one.

Double jeopardy if your father, rather than your mother, is a U.S. citizen

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

In law school, I remember reading Nguyen v. INS (U.S. 2001).  This was an immigration case in which a young man, born out of wedlock in Vietnam to a U.S. citizen father and a Vietnamese mother and who had lived in the United States since he was six, was ordered deported after being convicted of sexual assault of a child.  As an immigration lawyer, the case stayed with me because the petitioner was Vietnamese, like me, and the gender discrimination issue was a thorny one to grapple with.

The young man at the heart of Nguyen v. INS, Tuan Anh Nguyen, had uncontested legal permanent resident status, but only citizenship status would save him from deportation.  The law at the time of Nguyen’s birth imposed different requirements for unwed U.S. citizen fathers to transmit citizenship to their children than for unwed U.S. citizen mothers.  For the record, the requirements for unwed fathers and unwed mothers are still different under current law, but to a lesser degree.  In Nguyen’s case, for an unwed father to transmit citizenship to his child, the father must have resided in the United States for a total period of at least five years at the time of the child’s birth, with at least two of those years being after the father turned 16.  In addition, the father had to meet a number of other conditions, one of which was to establish the paternity of the child before that child turned 18.  It was this particular requirement that prevented Nguyen from establishing his U.S. citizenship through parentage, as Nguyen’s father did not take this step until after Nguyen turned 18.  Had Nguyen’s mother been the U.S. citizen, rather than his father, she would only have needed to have resided in the United States for 12 continuous months at the time of his birth to transmit citizenship to him.  Nguyen challenged the higher standard for unwed fathers to transmit citizenship as violating Equal Protection.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, held that, pursuant to an intermediate scrutiny standard, the different treatment of unwed mothers and fathers did not violate Equal Protection.  The majority, in a less-than-convincing opinion, justified the different treatment of unwed mothers and fathers based on (1) the fact that women give birth makes it reasonable to require that fathers provide some additional proof to establish paternity; and (2) the fact that women give birth gives mothers a greater opportunity to develop a meaningful parent-child relationship with their children than fathers with their children.

The end result was that Nguyen is not a U.S. citizen and presumably was deported to Vietnam, even though he had not lived there since he was six years old.

This term, the Supreme Court will be deciding another immigration gender discrimination case in which the ability of unwed U.S. fathers to transmit citizenship to their children is again held to a higher standard than for unwed U.S. mothers.  In Flores-Villar v. United States, another young man faces deportation even though his father is a U.S. citizen.  Ruben Flores-Villar came to the United States at two months of age and has lived here ever since.  He was first ordered deported for an importation of marijuana conviction.  He kept coming back home, however (imagine that!), and kept being re-deported.  Finally, during the seventh deportation proceeding, Flores-Villar raised the defense that he is a citizen because the different rules for transmission of citizenship for unwed mothers and unwed fathers violates Equal Protection.

In Flores-Villar’s case, the applicable statutory provision that prevents him from being a U.S. citizen by parentage is the requirement, for unwed U.S. citizen fathers, that the father have resided in the United States for at least five years after the age of 14.  This effectively means that men could not transmit citizenship to any children they had before the age of 19, as it would be chronologically impossible to accumulate this five-year residency requirement before turning 19 years old.  Flores-Villar’s father was 16 when he was born.  Had Flores-Villar’s mother been the U.S. citizen, though, she would only have needed to have resided in the United States for a period of 12 continuous months to transmit citizenship.

The United States is arguing that the lowered standard for unwed mothers is aimed at preventing the creation of stateless children, that is, children who can claim no nationality and thus can claim no country’s protection.  This is based on the fact that in some countries a child born to an unwed mother is treated as having the nationality of the mother, rather than the nationality of the country of birth.  If the United States were to make it difficult for an unwed U.S. citizen mother to transmit citizenship to her child then there might be a lot of children out there who don’t have U.S. citizenship but also don’t have the citizenship of the country in which they were born.  One might then ask, why put up any roadblocks to this goal by mandating time-in-residency requirements for either unwed mothers or unwed fathers?  But another competing policy consideration from the government’s standpoint is to ensure that children who receive U.S. citizenship through a parent have some ties to the United States, and the solution to this concern appears to be the requirement that the parent has spent some time living here.  The question is, does the goal of reducing the potential for stateless children justify the different treatment of unwed fathers’ versus unwed mothers’ ability to transmit U.S. citizenship?

With Flores-Villar, I can at least see both sides of the legal arguments:  the Supreme Court is being asked to weigh the government’s purported interest in preventing the children of unwed mothers from being deemed stateless against the resulting discrimination against unwed fathers.  What I find particularly troubling is the result that no unwed father under the age of 19 can transmit U.S. citizenship, while unwed mothers of any age can.  This creates an unacceptable risk of creating stateless children of unwed U.S. fathers and this provision should be struck, if nothing else.  It should not be impossible for a U.S. citizen to transmit citizenship to his children based solely on his age at the time of the child’s birth.

In Nguyen, the Court’s reasoning that the biological fact of birth makes it easier to determine maternity than paternity and, further, makes unwed mothers more likely to form a stable, lasting relationship with their children than unwed fathers is outdated and sexist.  DNA testing and evolving parental roles make it ever less likely that men who want to help their children claim U.S. citizenship by parentage will not actually be the biological fathers of these children and not be integrally involved in their children’s lives.  In addition, the lower standard for unwed mothers allows women to have much less established relationships with their children and yet still be able to transmit U.S. citizenship.  This discrepancy allows the identified goal of ensuring that a child has sufficient ties to the United States to fall by the wayside when it is the mother transmitting citizenship.

But putting aside the legal arguments, what is at stake here is that individuals whose only known home country is the United States, and who have committed crimes but served their time, are being forced into exile, and even an immigration lawyer cannot help them in such a case.  Had their mothers been U.S. citizens instead of their fathers, they would not be subject to deportation.  It must seem bizarre to Nguyen and Flores-Villar and to everyone else in this situation that such a twist in some obscure immigration law can have such a profound effect on their lives.  It’s like being subject to double jeopardy, being punished for your crime and then deported, but only if your father were the U.S. citizen parent.  Having your mother be the U.S. citizen parent is like the get-out-of-jail-free card.

Deportation of foreign nationals who come here as adults and commit serious crimes is a necessary tool in policing our communities.  But the deportation of those who came here as young children and who have the strongest ties to communities here in the United States, while serving to get rid of people with unsavory criminal histories, also devastates the U.S. communities to which these individuals belong.  And keep in mind that the deportee will find himself or herself a stranger in a strange land, more than likely without the support of a caring community.  What kind of new life will the deportee build?  Is this really what we want to be doing?

Djung Tran, Esq.

Tran Law Associates