Miller Mayer immigration attorney Steve Yale-Loehr was quoted by law.com in “Immigration Lawyers Welcome Clarity and Lessening of Bias Wrought by Court Notification Statute on Hochul’s Desk.” A measure, passed by the New York legislature and awaiting Gov. Hochul’s signature, is structured so that courts would give standard required language about the risk of immigration consequences resulting from a guilty plea to everyone—the court wouldn’t first find out whether a defendant is a noncitizen. “So there’s no discrimination in that sense,” Steve said. He noted that immigration law and criminal law are complicated, and that advising people about the intersection of them makes it even more complicated. “Many times people erroneously think that it’s only if they plead guilty to a felony crime that they might be deportable, but in many cases under federal immigration law, pleading guilty to a misdemeanor can also make you deportable,” he said. Read the article here.
Steve was quoted by Spectrum News in “Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Office Handling Asylum Cases for New England States.” He explained that some outside factors may have played a part in the Boston U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service office’s low approval rate. “There are a lot of reasons, [including] high turnover of officers [and] pressure to decide cases quickly … if [officers] see the same kind of case over and over again, you sort of feel like you know that type of case without really probing into the individual facts of the case. … There’s a lot of disparity in all of the USCIS asylum offices and it got worse during the Trump administration. There was pressure from headquarters to make it harder to win approval. So approval rates across the country went down. They just seem to have gone down more in Boston than in some of the other USCIS asylum offices.” Read the article here.