The government has filed their report in the DV case. They are saying that 122 diversity visas have been issued to plaintiffs and 1009 in total. That’s only a fraction of the named plaintiffs and there about 45K are waiting on visas all together. Not a serious effort here.
There are 425 named plaintiffs. The government says all but five have been interviewed or scheduled for interviews (we believe most have not actually been interviewed). The govt says 128 people have been denied for reasons unrelated to the proclamations. That’s very suspicious.
Want to bet they are for lacking documents that they would have had plenty of time to provide or correct had these applications been adjudicated when they were supposed to have been?
The government is blaming COVID for their inability to issue visas. Let’s remember - they were supposed to issue 45,000 more visas by this point. They’ve issued 1000. They’re at full-staff and have banned most immigrant visas. They’ve had loads of time.
They’re also blaming their own bureaucracy for the inability to move quickly. They should have thought about that before they banned visas for 100s of 1000s of people completely outside the scope of the law.
This document is one long list of excuses for the judge. We’ve got a whole lot of evidence they haven’t been acting in good faith and the judge needs to take extraordinary measures to make this right.
The government is reserving the right to brief their position on our request that DV visas be reserved past September 30th.
I have co-authored the J-1 Visa Guidebook published by LexisNexis which has been published in annual editions since the 1990s and is the main treatise on the subject. So I'm pretty familiar with the rules for J-1 visa holders including at the time Musk attended Stanford. The moment he dropped out and was no longer in good academic standing, he was out of J-1 status (e.g. illegal) and unauthorized to work. If he successfully transitioned to H-1B status, it was because he either left the country and reentered in that status or he lied to USCIS (then the INS) about his status. They didn't track J-1 students all that closely until after 9/11 when they created SEVIS. So it was a lot easier to get away with things. I have no idea if it was the former or the latter, but it doesn't look like Elon is claiming he was still attending Stanford when he got the H-1B and the emails published with the story certainly seem to show otherwise.
Musk would have needed to be engaged in a full course of study (at least 12 academic hours a semester) in order to qualify for work while being a J-1 student. And Stanford would have had to have approved the work. The Washington Post's reporting is that he was not a student anymore when he was working in his startup.
780K! We sued @USCIS 2 years ago to call out gaming of the H-1B lottery that's happening in the IT staffing industry where applicants are filing 10+ lottery applications by getting multiple employer sponsors. @USCIS told the judge they were addressing the problem. Crickets since.
@USCIS@USCIS says in today's notice that more than half of the applicants were multiple filers and that they may refer some people for investigation of fraud. BUT. uscis.gov/working-in-the…
Yesterday, @USCISDirector Ur Jaddou noted that the agency was looking outside the box to find ways to make the immigration system run better. Here's one - scrap the advance parole requirement for adjustment applicants. It's not actually mandated by the statute. 1x
@USCISDirector The whole advance parole system is a creature of USCIS-created regulations based on the idea that people who depart the US while an adjustment application is pending have abandoned their applications. 2x
@USCISDirector Why does @USCIS make this assumption? Why would people who pay thousands of dollars have the intention of abandoning their cases just because they travel internationally? How about just deny the case if the person fails to show up for their interview. 3x
I’ve just learned from a very reliable lawyer of a disturbing incident involving a US Army soldier seeking to enter the US with humanitarian parole issued by USCIS (& stamped by State) who was entering the US to attend his naturalization interview. 1x
The soldier was flying from Qatar to Dallas (DFW). A CBP officer (I have his name but am not publishing it at this point) refused to honor the parole document, put him on a flight back to Qatar and seized his military ID. 2x
The officer accused him of being an “immigrant not in possession of an immigrant visa” and stamped “CANCELLED-DAL” in red letters all over the parole stamp. They also seized his Social Security card and Employment Authorization Document. 3x
And if you needed another reason to vote against prosecutor Amy Weirich, look no further. One more reason we need someone like @SteveMulroy901 in the job.