Angelo Paparelli Published in The New York Law Journal
"Form(s) Over Substance: Agency Plunges to New Low"

Angelo Paparelli co-authored the article, "Form(s) Over Substance: Agency Plunges to New Low," which was published August 24, 2009 in The New York Law Journal. In the article, the authors discuss how the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been in continuous disarray with the resignation of its last director. According to the authors, there has been "intractable backlogs, opaque procedures, and a doubting-Thomas bureaucracy still mired in a century-old system of paper-based petitions." They also predict that the new director, Alejandro Mayorkas, will have his hands full, because USCIS officers are more focused on detecting fraud than interpreting the law with commonsense notions of fairness and justice.

The authors illustrate some of the problems with the USCIS by discussing how Ben Neufeld, a Canadian religious worker was separated from his family over a minor technicality that immigration officers, by state and regulation, are allowed to forgive. According to the article, the USCIS granted Mr. Neufeld a work visa to enter the United States with his wife and child, however, when his church requested an extension they made a mistake by including his wife and child on the extension request, when they should have filed them separately. This mistake was not brought to their attention until Mr. Neufeld's green card was approved. The USCIS denied the applications of his wife and child because they had been out of status for more than a year. The Neufelds decided that Mrs. Neufeld and their children should return to Canada rather than stay without permission. However, the "unlawful presence" of his wife and one of his children triggered a 10-year bar to reentry for not properly extending their visa status in a timely fashion.

The authors note that “the USCIS officer adjudicating their green card applications should have recognized that the ‘unlawful presence’ of Mrs. Neufeld and her son was the result of an innocent mistake.” They explain that the adjudicator could have applied a forgiveness provision contained in the section of law allowing USCIS to grant green-card status despite minor errors committed for "technical reasons." Alternatively, the officer could have just had them submit the necessary I-539 work visa extension application form late and then exercised discretion favorably to grant the status retroactively. The authors conclude, “It should be the responsibility of the leaders and managers at USCIS to train the adjudicators to exercise their discretion favorably in appropriate cases and review denials before they are issued.”

The full text of the article is available on the Publications of Angelo's biographic page on Seyfarth.com.