Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Quimby Continuing Legal Education course, 10 Rules for New Immigration Lawyers. I'm Matthew Blaisdell and I'd like to thank you for spending the next hour in which we'll cover likely more than just 10 rules, and I'd also like to note that this is not just for new immigration attorneys, but the point is rather to help you become more familiar with the professional and ethical questions that any of us are most likely to encounter in this practice. In so doing, we'll identify the greatest ethical risks for new immigration lawyers, review the model rules that new immigration lawyers should study most closely, consider practices to minimize your risk, and understand the penalties and procedures that apply to violations within the very specific world of immigration practice, which, as you may know, is an administrative field with its own rules, courts, agencies, and procedures. Let's start out by looking at the world of immigration practice as it relates to professional conduct, cover 10 rules in some detail, discuss how to manage your risk, penalties and procedures, and provide a few more rules for you to keep in mind. There are four main agencies involved in immigration practice. The Department of Homeland Security covers every agency interaction within the borders of the United States. The Department of Justice provides us the administrative immigration courts, as well as the federal courts that review certain types of petitions and reviews of the immigration court decisions. The Department of State, which covers the consulates, and the Department of Labor, in which you'll encounter primarily just in the employment-based context, should you practice in that area. Within DHS, the three main agencies are USCIS, ICE, and CBP. At USCIS, the lockbox is where you send your mail, the regional service centers are what process the applications, the local field offices schedule interviews and make decisions on cases, and the Fraud Detection and National Security Office engages in investigations primarily related to applications that are filed. ICE is the enforcement side, as opposed to USCIS, which is more of the benefit side. And within ICE, there's the Enforcement and Removal Office, those are the guys who engage in investigations and arrests, primarily. The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, which we'll often refer to as the Office of Chief Counsel, they're the lawyers, they're the ones we engage with in immigration court. National Security Investigations is the equivalent to FDNS in ICE, they cover offenses such as trafficking and fraud and other crimes that are not primarily related to applications that people file. And Customs and Border Protection, they are at the ports of entry all over the country, so think like the borders, the airports, et cetera, and various sub-offices. Within the Department of Justice, the U.S. Immigration Court functions primarily as the trial court, whereas the Board of Immigration Appeals, the BIA, reviews decisions of the U.S. Immigration Court, and the Federal District Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals review decisions of the U.S. Immigration Court and the BIA. You may also end up practicing district courts or the courts of appeals for certain types of actions that are filed directly with them, such as, for example, a writ of mandamus. Whereas the Department of State features different consulates in pretty much every country with different policies and procedures of their own, sometimes regarding the same rules and regulations that USCIS covers, but often with their own spin on them as they have their own different policies. And there's the Department of Labor, so you'll see what we refer to as ETA and the Foreign Labor Certification process as relates to H-1B petitions, what we call PERM filings, and other esoterica that are specific to the employment-based context. I won't go into that now because we're just providing a very broad overview so you have some idea of the practice that you may be walking into. As far as the essentials of practice, the things you really need to know to provide context to how ethics and the professional rules are understood in immigration, I like to refer to the three Cs. These are consequences, complexity, and competence. You need to know what you don't know in order to competently practice, and you need to know the stakes to appreciate the extent of the effects that your conduct has on your clients and the potential liability that entails to you. And you need to understand the capacity or the competency of your clients to fully grasp your responsibilities for working within this population. Within what I call the essentials, there's the potential eligibility for benefits. So that's what you're trying to get your clients, whether they're family-based cases, employment, skills-based, humanitarian, or a removal deportation defense. These are the things you're helping them get, some kind of status typically, or say employment or travel authorization.