Wednesday, June 24, 2009

There are still nice Immigration Officers

Had a great interview today with a nice Immigration Service Officer. There are those who work for CIS who think that their job it to be tough, and to deny applications that are not easily approvable. The love to cite "Matter of Brantigan" when denying cases that are not established to their satisfaction. While their denials may be proper, that does not mean that they are right.

The officer today went out of his way (again) to tell my clients, who were previously represented by an attorney in Miami, that they needed to prove that a waiver was justified in their case. He explained at length what the waiver was for, and explained that although they come from a poor and dangerous country, that is not enough, on its own, for a successful waiver application. Their previous attorney had submitted a one page letter by the wife, broken into three bulletpoints, about the hardship she, and her four children, would suffer were her husband denied his lawful permanent residence. The letter from the wife (written by the lawyer, I imagine) even misspelled the name of the husband.

This one letter, by itself, constitutes a terrible application for a waiver that must be denied, regardless of the hardship one could properly assume for one from a country so poor and dangerous.

This nice Immigration Service Officer was entitled to deny the waiver and send these people on their way (see "Matter of Brantigan"), but he decided to bring the people back in so that he could explain the waiver requirements to them again. Uncalled for, incredibly nice, above and beyond the call of duty, and a credit to this officer and his office.

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