The L1 visa is a means by which workers for a company with specialized knowledge, as well as executives and managers of the company, are able to transfer from foreign offices of the company to offices based in the United States.

In order to be eligible for an L1 visa, employees must have worked for the company for a minimum of one continuous year of the previous three. The employee must be coming to the United States to work as a manager or executive, or as an employee with special knowledge, for the U.S. branch of the company.

The L1A visa (for executives and managers) permits stay within the United States for seven years, while L1B visa allows employees with specialized knowledge to remain in the United States for five years, after which they must return to work at the foreign parent or subsidiary for a year before they are eligible to reapply for the L1 visa.

The L1 visa allows for spouses and children (under age 21) to come to the United States as well under L2 status. Spouses are permitted to work under L2 visas, but children are not.

In order to qualify for adjustment of status green card one must:

1. be in the United States legally
2. qualify for an immigrant visa that immediately available
3. be in good standing of current visa

Adjustment of Status Requirement Exceptions

Under the first exception, some of those who entered the county illegally adjustment of status under Section 245(i) may be available.  In order to qualify for this exception one must pay a penalty of $1,000 USD, be the beneficiary of an immigrant visa petition filed between 1998 and April 30, 2001.

Under the second exception, immediate relatives of U.S. citizens need not be in good standing of their current visa.  Immediate relatives are defined as children, spouses, and parents of United States citizens.

Adjustment of Status Lawyer

Our adjustment of status attorneys are particularly dedicated to working with clients on family based immigration law.  This includes adjustment of status visas through marriage.  Our adjustment of status lawyers can assist clients through each step of the adjustment of process application including the adjustment of status interview.  As a adjustment of status law firm, we can serve clients throughout the United States and the world with U.S. immigration law.

The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) is a program designed to monitor the exchange programs, and requires that all J1 visa holders register with Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).  Spouses and children under the age of 21 of the J1 visa holder can accompany them to the United States by obtaining derivative J visas. They are permitted to remain for the duration of the J1 visa holder’s stay, but cannot work while in the United States. In order to work they must apply to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and receive permission to do so.

The R-1 visa offers the opportunity for religious workers to come to the United States in order to perform that work. Religious workers include those authorized by a religious denomination to perform acts associated with clergy (for example priest or monk) or those working at a religious occupation (such as religious instructors or missionaries).

The denomination itself must have a bona fide nonprofit religious organization within the United States, and the religious worker must have been a member of the religion for at least two years immediately preceding the application for the R-1 visa. The R-1 visa permits the holder of the visa to travel freely within the United States, and allows for the bringing of a spouse and any unmarried children under age 21 to the United States.

R1 Visa Application

Application for the R-1 visa requires the filing of form I-129, Petition for Nonimmigrant Alien Worker. Applicants must also have documents proving their membership in the religious organization, as well as proof of their religious employment.

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Flanked by his counterparts from Mexico and Canada, President Obama on Monday reiterated his commitment to pursuing comprehensive immigration reform, despite his packed political agenda and the staunch opposition such an initiative is likely to face.

Mr. Obama predicted that he would be successful but acknowledged the challenges, saying, “I’ve got a lot on my plate.” He added that there would almost certainly be “demagogues out there who try to suggest that any form or pathway for legalization for those who are already in the United States is unacceptable.”

But in the most detailed outline yet of his timetable, the president said that he expected Congress, after completing work on health care, energy and financial regulation, to draft immigration bills this year. He said he would begin work on getting the measures passed in 2010.

“Now, am I going to be able to snap my fingers and get this done? No,” the president said. “But ultimately, I think the American people want fairness. And we can create a system in which you have strong border security and an orderly process for people to come in. But we’re also giving an opportunity for those who are already in the United States to be able to achieve a pathway to citizenship so they don’t have to live in the shadows.”

The president’s comments came during a news conference at the end of a summit meeting of North American leaders aimed at increasing cooperation in the region and resolving some of the issues that have long strained trilateral relations among the countries, whose people and economies depend heavily on one another.

During the meetings, which began Sunday afternoon, Mr. Obama, President Felipe Calderón of Mexico and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada discussed climate change and clean energy, swine flu, immigration, trade and organized crime. While it was clear at the news conference that the three leaders had not reached any significant new agreements, they expressed understanding for one another’s positions and vowed to keep working to resolve outstanding disputes.

Mr. Harper, for example, stood by a decision a month ago to require Mexicans to apply for visas but said that the problems were Canada’s, not Mexico’s. “It is simply far too easy to make a bogus refugee claim as a way of entering the country,” he said. “And we have to change that.”

A “Buy American” provision attached to the United States stimulus package has ignited a political storm in Canada. But on Monday, Mr. Obama played down the scope of the program, saying it was something he had grudgingly accepted to achieve the greater purpose of pumping money into America’s flailing economy.

“I think it’s important to keep this in perspective,” Mr. Obama said. “This in no way has endangered the billions of dollars in trade taking place between our two countries.”

Mr. Obama offered a spirited defense of Mr. Calderón’s efforts to rein in the drug cartels, a fight that has left nearly 4,200 people dead this year. Recently, Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, raised concerns about human rights abuses in the drug war, and Democratic legislators have threatened to withhold some financial support.

At the news conference, Mr. Obama said unequivocally that he would push for continuing America’s support for the Mexican effort, adding, “The biggest, by far, violators of human rights right now are the cartels themselves that are kidnapping people, extorting people and encouraging corruption.”

Mr. Calderón issued his own passionate defense, saying, “The struggle, the battle, the fight against organized crime is precisely to preserve the human rights of Mexican people.”

The Mexican Supreme Court supported the army on Monday by declining to take up a case pushed by human rights advocates that challenged the use of military prosecutors, instead of civilian ones, in pursuing charges against rogue soldiers.

If there were divisions on other issues, all three leaders seemed united in their support for Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran president who was ousted June 28 in what countries around the world have condemned as a coup.

“Let me be very clear in our belief that President Zelaya was removed from office illegally, that it was a coup and that he should return,” Mr. Obama said. He dismissed as “hypocrisy” the criticism from some in Latin America who say the United States has done too little to pressure Honduras’s de facto government to return Mr. Zelaya to power — among them Mr. Zelaya himself.

“The critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras,” he said, “are the same people who say that we’re always intervening, and that the Yankees need to get out of Latin America.”

Because of Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, the United States has supported suspending Honduras from the Organization of American States and has cut $16.5 million in military assistance. The United States, which is Honduras’s largest trading partner, has been reluctant, however, to call for tougher economic sanctions.

Critics of Washington’s approach, led by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, accuse the United States of placating the small group of Honduran elite who are among those who support Mr. Zelaya’s removal. Senior administration officials have said they were concerned about destabilizing the third-poorest country in the hemisphere.

By SUZANNE GAMBOA (AP)

WASHINGTON — Immigration officials are immediately ending the housing of families at a former prison in central Texas as a first step in transforming immigration detentions from a criminal to a civil system.

The head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, says some families will go to Berks Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania. But he also says decisions about what to do with families will be made on a case-by-case basis.

Morton told reporters Thursday that redesigning immigration detention will take several years but the result will be more accountable and uniform. He says the agency will continue to detain people and do so on a large scale.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Homeland Security Department intends to put federal employees in charge of monitoring the treatment of detainees in the country’s largest immigration detention facilities, two years after the government turned that job over to a private company.

The Obama administration plans to place 23 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at the largest detention facilities to supervise how the detention centers are managed, according to people briefed on the plan. Private contractors have been used since 2007, when they were hired to ensure impartial inspections. Before that, federal employees did the job.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement planned to announce details of the detention policy changes in a conference call with reporters Thursday.

While ICE is calling the switch to federal monitors and other changes to the detention system “major reforms,” this, like the Obama administration’s plan to enforce immigration law at the workplace, is not an overhaul. The new detention center plan includes a tweaking of past policies and some new positions.

The government has been criticized for its treatment of immigration detainees, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has made detention policies a top priority for her department.

ICE, which is part of Homeland Security, intends to hire a medical expert to review the health care protocols for the detention centers and give an independent review of medical complaints, according to the people briefed on the plan. They spoke only on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement explained some of the plan to immigration advocates in a conference call Wednesday evening. ICE said it plans to turn a detention center in Texas for parents and their children into a women’s facility and no longer place families there, said a person who was on the call. A separate facility in Pennsylvania will continue housing families.

Shortly after Napolitano became secretary, she named Dora Schriro to advise her on detentions and arrests. Schriro headed Arizona’s corrections department when Napolitano was governor of the state.

As part of its plan, the department will create another new position to be filled by Schriro: director of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning.

Detention has grown in recent years, with the federal government holding more than 32,000 detainees each day. Over the last four years, the budget for keeping immigrants in custody has nearly doubled to $1.7 billion, according to ICE.

Several bills were filed last week by Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., to revamp the immigration detention system. The bills call for setting minimum detention standards and for the homeland security secretary to enforce laws on treatment of detainees.

After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.

A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters, who have opened a national campaign against them, including small street protests in New York and Los Angeles last week.

The administration recently undertook audits of employee paperwork at hundreds of businesses, expanded a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized as flawed, bolstered a program of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies, and rejected proposals for legally binding rules governing conditions in immigration detention centers.

“We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way,” Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said in an interview.

Ms. Napolitano and other administration officials argue that no-nonsense immigration enforcement is necessary to persuade American voters to accept legislation that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, a measure they say Mr. Obama still hopes to advance late this year or early next.

That approach brings Mr. Obama around to the position that his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, espoused during last year’s presidential campaign, a stance Mr. Obama rejected then as too hard on Latino and immigrant communities. (Mr. McCain did not respond to requests for comment.) Now the enforcement strategy has opened a political rift with some immigrant advocacy and Hispanic groups whose voters were crucial to the Obama victory.

“Our feelings are mixed at best,” said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, immigration director of the National Council of La Raza, which has joined in the criticism, aimed primarily at Ms. Napolitano. “We understand the need for sensible enforcement, but that does not mean expanding programs that often led to civil rights violations.”

Under Ms. Napolitano, immigration authorities have backed away from the Bush administration’s frequent mass factory roundups of illegal immigrant workers. But federal criminal prosecutions for immigration violations have actually increased this year, according to a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan group that analyzes government data. In April, there were 9,037 immigration cases in the federal courts, an increase of 32 percent over April 2008, the group found.

Ms. Napolitano said in the interview that she would not call off immigration raids entirely as some Hispanic lawmakers have suggested. “We will continue to enforce the law and to look for effective ways to do it,” she said. “That’s my job.”

Ms. Napolitano, who as governor of Arizona sparred with Republican legislators seeking tougher steps against illegal immigration, said she was looking for ways to make enforcement programs inherited from President George W. Bush less heavy-handed. She also wants to put the enforcement focus on illegal-immigrant gang members and convicts and on employers who routinely hire illegal immigrants so as to exploit them.

Immigration authorities have started audits of employees’ hiring documents at more than 600 businesses nationwide. If an employer shows a pattern of hiring immigrants whose documents cannot be verified, a criminal investigation could follow, Ms. Napolitano said.

She has also expanded a federal program, known as E-Verify, that allows employers to verify electronically the identity information of new hires. Immigrant and business groups have sued to try to stop the program, saying the databases it relies on are riddled with inaccuracies that could lead to American citizens’ being denied jobs.

But officials of the Homeland Security Department say technological improvements have enhanced the speed and accuracy of E-Verify. With 137,000 employers now enrolled, only 0.3 percent of 6.4 million queries they have made so far in the 2009 fiscal year have resulted in denials that later proved incorrect, the officials say. That, opponents note, still means false denials for more than 19,000 people.

In addition, Ms. Napolitano has expanded a program that runs immigration checks on every person booked into local jails in some cities. And she recently announced the expansion of another program, known as 287(g) for the provision of the statute authorizing it, that allows for cooperation between federal immigration agents and state and local police agencies.

In extending 287(g), federal officials also drew up a new agreement, which all of some 66 localities currently participating have been asked to sign, that is intended to enhance federal oversight and clarify the priority on deporting those immigrants who are criminal fugitives or are already behind bars.

But advocates for immigrants said the new agreement did not include strong protections against ethnic profiling. They were surprised, they say, that Ms. Napolitano did not terminate the cooperation agreement with the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio, who calls himself the “toughest sheriff in America.” Latino groups in Arizona have accused Mr. Arpaio of using the program to harass Hispanic residents.

“If they reform the 287(g) program and Arpaio doesn’t change, it won’t be reform,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a national immigrant advocacy group.

Ms. Napolitano said it would be up to Mr. Arpaio, like other current participants, to decide whether to sign and abide by the new cooperation agreement. Separately, the Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation of Mr. Arpaio’s practices.

The Obama administration has received support for its immigration position from a leading Democrat, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, who will be writing an immigration overhaul bill later this year.

In preparation for what is likely to be a furious debate, Mr. Schumer has called on Democrats to show that they are serious about immigration enforcement and is even asking them to stop using the term “undocumented” to refer to immigrants who are here illegally.

Democrats have to “convince the American people there will not be new waves of illegal immigrants” after an overhaul passes, Mr. Schumer said in an interview.

Republicans who oppose any legalization of the status of illegal immigrants say they remain unimpressed by the new enforcement measures.

“After 20 years of broken promises, it takes a lot more than token gestures,” said Representative Brian P. Bilbray, a California Republican who heads an immigration caucus in the House.

Michael A. Olivas, a professor of immigration law at the University of Houston, said Hispanic advocates were irked by the enforcement measures because they had seen scant sign that the administration was also moving deliberately toward an overhaul bill.

“We literally have the worst of all worlds,” Professor Olivas said.

Nuestro bufete ofrece una gama completa de servicios con respecto a la ley de inmigración. Nuestros abogados entienden las necesidades de sus clientes de habla español y son capaces de ofrecer un toque personal a la inmigración y el derecho internacional las cuestiones, especialmente en lo que hacer frente a nuevos y viejos inmigrantes de América Central y del Sur.

Nuestros abogados de inmigración ayudar los clientes de habla español con todos los aspectos de la ley de inmigración de América. Nuestros abogados de inmigración y el personal habla español y entender la cultura latinoamericana. Nuestros abogados de inmigración español se enorgullecen de en su capacidad de respuesta a los clientes, la profesionalidad y atención al detalle. Nos esforzamos para mantener al cliente informado y crear un ambiente cómodo y accesible.

Nuestro bufete de abogados de inmigración trata de ofrecer calidad de servicios legales a precios razonables, si su caso es grande o pequeño.

Spanish

Our law firm provides a full spectrum of services with respect to immigration law. Our lawyers understand the needs of its Spanish speaking clients and are able to offer a unique personal touch to immigration and international law questions, especially as they deal with new and old immigrants from Central and South America.

Our immigration attorneys assist Spanish speaking clients with all aspects of American immigration law. Our immigration lawyers and staff speak Spanish and understand Latin American culture. Our Spanish immigration lawyers take pride in in their responsiveness to clients, professionalism, and attention to detail. We make our best efforts to keep clients informed and to create a comfortable atmosphere in which we are as accessible as possible.

Our immigration law firm seeks to provide quality of legal services at reasonable rates, whether your case is large or small.

The United States offers the opportunity to be successful and pursue the American Dream. We strive to help Chinese people live a better life in America.