“Immigration View” provides our audience with updates, observations and “heads-ups” from where we sit, as lawyers who deal with immigration issues on a daily basis. My observation for today is that refugees need to pursue the rights they have been granted to secure permanent residence and to naturalize and do so on a timely basis. Failure to do so can result in their removal to the country from which they fled.
Every year, tens of thousands of refugees are resettled in the US, In FY 2011, 56,000 refugees came to the U.S. because of their “well founded fear of persecution” on account of their race, religion, national origin, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. These people have been thoroughly vetted by law enforcement of various kinds before they come and are provided resettlement benefits from the federal government through national agencies with affiliates throughout the country.
One year after arrival, the refugee may file and should file for U.S. permanent residence (a greencard). After five years of permanent residence, the refugee may normally file and should file for naturalization to become a U.S. citizen.
A recent decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals points at what happens when a refugee fails to pursue the opportunity to become a citizen: he may be deported.
In Matter of D-K (25 I&N Dec 761, BIA, 2012), the Board confronted the case of a refugee who had been here for many years and committed a crime. The Board engaged in a technical discussion of the status of a refugee and concluded that both upon entry and upon seeking permanent residence the refugee could be subject to removal based on the grounds of deportability under Section 237 of the Act. D-K had been admitted as a refugee in 1998 and didn’t get around to filing for permanent residence until years later. D-K- committed a drug related crime in 2009. While refugees may be eligible for a waiver of grounds of deportability, based on the crime that D-K committed, he faces the probability of removal from the US.
Not that I condone criminal activity or oppose the removal of criminal aliens, but a lesson is that refugees must timely pursue the rights given to them by Congress and be pushed to do so by the agencies that resettle them. It appears that if D-K- would have done so, he could have been a US citizen by 2009. Upon his conviction, he would have been treated like any other US citizen criminal and not face removal to a country whose persecution he had fled many years before.