Got a pair of U visa approvals today!

U visas provide status for victims of certain crimes. The qualifying rules can be quite technical. My clients waited nearly 6 years, for crimes that occurred 10-15 years ago.

All that uncertainty over status is now over.
There's a massive backlog of U visas: note how long these cases were pending. And one of the requirements is the police signing off on a certification form that qualifies the crime, and attests to the help the victim gave in prosecuting it.
U visas are a great way to engender trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement.

Sadly, not all jurisdictions like to participate in such easy community policing. When police refuse to sign, the U visa is not available.

Signing U visas should be official policy!
Here in Virginia, our state senator @ssurovell introduced a bill to standardize *and* streamline the process of U visa certification across the Commonwealth.

It was signed into law by @GovernorVA just 10 days ago.
U (and T visas, for trafficking victims) are some of the humanitarian visas available. They need to be expanded so aspiring Americans aren't relegated to an underclass.

My clients were undocumented for nearly 20 years. Now they're not. What would deporting them have solved?
Congress reconvened today with a heavy mandate to pass some immigration reforms.

I'm under no illusions, but I hope this simple reminder is repeated to those who need to hear it:

A rising tide lifts all boats.

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More from @HMAesq

11 Apr
This is the white nationalist #TantonNetwork at work.

Notice the frame the border is chaos, the only way to fix it is by militarizing it, and use tropes of criminal brown people lumped together in one boogeyman shouting in Spanish and Arabic.
Convenient they leave out the fact that our mismanaged border is a direct result of the enforcement-only policies they've pushed for decades. They've cost taxpayers billions with the bloated deportation machine they built, and now offer as a solution to the problem they caused.
Who's in the #TantonNetwork?

@FAIRImmigration
@CIS_org
@numbersusa
@IRLILaw
@PFIRorg

And a few others. I'd say check out @colcomfdn list of donees, but Colcom (chief funder of the Tanton Network) scrubbed their website of their list. Hmmm....

nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/…
Read 4 tweets
11 Apr
SUCCESS!!

I'm 2 days late posting this because I got hacked an hour after I posted a thread on @stephenm and white nationalist law group.

On 4/9, the Mich. Supreme Court ruled in my favor: my lawsuit v. @UMich to unseal the #TantonPapers will proceed!

hma-legal.com/mich-supreme-c…
If you're new here: 4 years ago I filed a FOIA to unseal the secret papers of John Tanton, the racist mastermind behind the anti-immigrant movement.

His organizations, known as the Tanton Network, are responsible for stalling immigration reform for the past 30 years.
They run for cover when confronted with evidence of their eugenics-fueled origins.

Sadly, they're rarely confronted. That's why I want to break the seal on their founders' papers.

motherjones.com/politics/2021/…
Read 11 tweets
8 Apr
Arch-white nationalist @StephenM announced yesterday a new legal organization to mount challenges to anything the Biden administration does that he deems illegal.

thehill.com/homenews/media…
"America First Legal," is an all white male gang of ideologues includes former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, one of Trump's acting Attorneys General Matthew Whitaker, former OMB director Russ Vought, former DOJ counselor Gene Hamilton, and...
Conservative Partnership Institute executives Ed Corrigan and Wesley Denton. (CPI was founded by Jim DeMint, former S. Carolina congressman, who left the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation, only to be ousted in 2017 for-get this-being too cozy with the Trump administration)
Read 13 tweets
20 Mar
Looking forward to this, Mehdi.

He'll be repeating the talking points fed to him by groups like FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA.

They're white supremacists and I hope you put their ideology on trial.
Lies like the majority of asylum cases are fraudulent, that MPP was for protection, that there will otherwise be an 'invasion,' that no one shows up for their hearings, that they're diseased, unskilled, and will steal jobs and drain our economy.
Ignoring facts that it's due to policies pushed by those groups that the border is so horribly mismanaged, that asylum seekers still contribute despite the law disempowering them, that COVID rates are negligible, that they create jobs or fulfill a needed sector.
Read 4 tweets
19 Mar
The #DreamAndPromiseAct passed 228-197, remarkably bipartisan. So did the #FarmWorkforceModernizationAct at 247-174.

On to the Senate.

Yes, I know the odds. But I'm not letting up the pressure and NEITHER SHOULD YOU.

We can make this happen.
Here's a summary of a detailed letter drafted by some of us working on exposing the white nationalism in our immigration policy - the so-called #TantonNetwork.

See my pinned tweet for more. Yes, it's that bad.
Yes, this will make it to the Hill.

In Sept 2019, alone with @Alyssa_Milano and @morethanmySLE we met with 17+ members of Congress, to let them know about the Tanton Network and explain how they had the immigration debate on lockdown.
Read 6 tweets
6 Mar
Something about this win made me tear up today. Our client could barely breathe when he tried to relate the campaign of terror MS-13 unleashed on him and his family. Today, he also lost breath.

He just kept repeating "no tengo palabras, no tengo palabras..." (I don't have words)
We got this case right before the interview. A loss here would mean years stuck in immigration court and likely a deportation order.

What made this case unusual was he filed his case after being here for almost 20 years. The law says you have 1 year to file.
Exceptional circumstances can excuse this, but they have to be exceptional. We had <10 days to rescue this case.

When he started testifying, there trauma was undeniable.

So we live-researched trauma as an exceptional circumstance.
Read 7 tweets

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