28 Feb Board of Immigration Appeals Grants Clients I-601 Fraud Waiver
This appeal was pending for a long time at the BIA after the Government had appealed our client’s grant by the Immigration Judge who had approved our application for a waiver of fraud. Our client had attempted to enter the U.S. with a fake passport that her smuggler had provided to her and later submitted an asylum application based on her having undergone a forced abortion in China. She eventually married a U.S. citizen and applied for a green card (via the process known as adjustment of status) through her marriage. Because she had entered the U.S. by using a fake passport, we disclosed this on her application and applied for a waiver of fraud on Form I-601 which requires a showing of extreme hardship to the U.S. citizen spouse in the event that the immigrant is deported. While a layman would expect that the extreme hardship would be easy to establish, “extreme hardship” is a legal term of art, and this legal standard is actually quite difficult to meet under the caselaw. By referencing the facts of the applicable BIA precedent cases and explaining how they relate to our client’s case, we were able to convince the BIA that our interpretation and that of our client’s judge was correct and that the Government’s interpretation was wrong. After waiting many years for a final decision in her case, our client is extremely happy, with her daughter also being granted a green card through her husband’s petition. Her daughter, who came to the U.S. only about two years ago is already a successful student at Drexel University.