This Phoenix immigration attorney is seeing a spike in citizenship applications

It’s a busy time for immigration attorneys. With President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign picking up and raids in cities across the country, they’re getting swamped with calls and, according to our next guest, sometimes have to turn folks away.

Juliana Manzanarez is a Valley immigration attorney and founder of Via Law Group. She told The Show that seemingly constant rule changes and sped up timelines from the federal government are making it more difficult.

Full conversation

JULIANA MANZANAREZ: We're all stretched pretty thin, especially those that do deportation defense, those that take cases for people that are detained. Those timelines are really fast. So that's what makes us even more slammed.

LAUREN GILGER: And it sounds like that's happening more often. These timelines are getting sped up by the federal government. The rules are changing. Tell us about that.

MANZANAREZ: Yeah, so there's a couple of different rules that are changing for practitioners. So one of them is on the detained side. Whenever you go in to ask for a continuance, because maybe it's going to be your first appearance, you might have gotten like a month or a month and a half, nothing incredibly long.

Now the rules are you're not going to get more than two weeks. So now we're essentially going through whole cases from the beginning to trial in about a month, a month and a half.

GILGER: Wow. 

MANZANAREZ: Appellate rules recently changed without warning. They publish in the Federal Register rules and regulations because that's where we get our power from. That, instead of 30 days for a notice of appeal that you want to appeal your case, you get 10 days. And it's not an automatic, “We'll get you the transcripts, we'll issue you some dates for you to submit your arguments in writing.”

It's, well, if all the judges on the Board of Immigration Appeals don't want to hear the case, we're just going to dismiss it outright in 15 days after that 10-day notice. So now it's less than a month where supposedly there's an appellate review for somebody.

GILGER: Are you mostly getting no's?

MANZANAREZ: Right now? Yes.

GILGER: I think one of the things that gets lost in the conversation about immigration and deportation is that it's more complicated than someone is here legally or someone is here illegally, right?

MANZANAREZ: Yeah.

GILGER: Tell us about that middle ground.

MANZANAREZ: Yeah. So there's so many factors that go into whether somebody can apply for residency or not. And I think that's the main thing is people, the general public that I've seen and asked me these questions as well is, well, they should just apply for citizenship.

Well, we can't even get there if they're not a green card holder or a permanent resident, and there's so many barriers to get there in terms of regulations, what Congress has approved in ‘97 that haven't been updated for today's time. There are backlogs depending on who's petitioning who for that.

And it can be a process of a year and a half if they're able to do everything from here within the United States, or it could be up to eight years if they have to go back to their country for that interview. There's so many nuances.

And then we have an administration that isn't necessarily changing who can apply, but they are changing what they decide to focus on on those applications. So the White House can't change, you know, a U.S. citizen spouse trying to get a green card for their spouse, right.

GILGER: Right. 

MANZANAREZ: What they can change is, well, how much money does that U.S. citizen have to make? Has the person that's applying for the immigration benefit ever, you know, received some sort of emergency access? If that's the case, can we impose a fine? These fines have now gone up. Application fees have gone up. Yeah.

GILGER: So part of the Trump administration's efforts to restrict legal immigration in this way as well, making it more difficult, different guidelines, etc. 

One thing that you've mentioned is that you're seeing more people trying to apply for citizenship, people who are eligible for citizenship but maybe didn't get around to it. It's expensive, it takes a long time.

MANZANAREZ: Yeah. Yeah, we saw that also during Trump 1.0. So I think it's somewhat fear-driven. Lawful permanent residents do carry, I would say, extra protections than maybe other types of people that are applying. And as they see enforcement ramping up in different cities, I get a lot of people that have been eligible to apply for many years that are ready to do it now.

Usually what I get is, well, I've been a resident for a really long time. I travel in and out of the United States as I'm allowed to do. And now I'm getting questioned more and more at the border or at airports about things that happened 30 years ago. Why is that?

And it's me explaining, well, every time you come in, you're asking for permission to come in as a lawful permanent resident. The way to avoid that is to become a U.S. citizen. And that's generally now what they're afraid of. Are they going to take my residency away for something that I did 20, 30 years ago that's already been disclosed, adjudicated? This government has decided it wasn't enough to take it away?

GILGER: So a lot of fear there. Tell us about the process to become a citizen. 

MANZANAREZ: The rules are you have to at least be a resident for five years.

GILGER: OK.

MANZANAREZ: You have to be able to take a civics exam, which this administration has changed, and an English exam.

GILGER: OK.

MANZANAREZ: And then they review your application. They're going to ask how you became a resident, your addresses, biographical information, have you been arrested, things along those lines.

GILGER: Yeah. 

MANZANAREZ: They have to prove good moral character. So the way that they've. That they've changed that a little bit is instead of 10 questions that they're asking for the civic exam, they're asking 12.

GILGER: How often or does it ever happen that folks are, you know, eligible for a citizenship, apply and are denied?

MANZANAREZ: Yeah. For different reasons. Maybe they didn't get enough questions right on the civics exam. Maybe they didn't pass the English portion. That just means that they get to come again in a few months and try again.

GILGER: OK.

MANZANAREZ: Sometimes you're denied because you had some criminal activity in the last five years that the officer deemed wasn't good moral character. And we're talking about criminal activity from, you know, like a DUI all the way up to, you know, some other felonies that wouldn't necessarily place you in immigration proceedings. But they're gonna look at, they're gonna look at all of that in the last five years.

GILGER: Yeah. 

MANZANAREZ: Or if there's a reason that, which is the most serious, if there's a reason that they believe that you shouldn't have become a permanent resident in the first place, that's where people should really be worried.

GILGER: Let me talk about that fear with you a little bit, like in the community in general, in the immigrant community here. I think the last time we heard a lot about fear of deportation, of ICE, of law enforcement in general, was 15 years ago when SB 1070 had been passed and you had Sheriff Joe Arpaio then, you know, patrolling Latino neighborhoods and arresting people for traffic infractions and things like that. 

I wonder if it sounds like that again to a lot of folks right now.

MANZANAREZ: It does. I think when I talk to my other colleagues as well and also just people that were involved in that movement, there's very similar parallels in terms of what we've seen.

However, I think the big difference is that was on a local level, and there was always some sort of comfort that we still had the backing of district courts and federal governments and there was still a resource in that judiciary. And I'm not saying that there isn't now, but it is very hard to think that way when a lot of opinions from different courts are coming down, not necessarily in favor of what we're asking for.

And they don't have to reinvent the wheel here, right. They have a way to look back and say, well, this is what Sheriff Joe did. Why don't we just go ahead and do that?

GILGER: Interesting.

MANZANAREZ: Again, do I think that that's a possibility, that it might happen? Yes. Are we seeing it as heavy now? No. Do I think it's coming? Yes.