What to do if you come across some mistakes in your immigration case?

No matter how carefully you chose your immigration attorney, he or she may have made mistakes that affected the outcome of your case. These mistakes can include failing to respond to requests for evidence, not submitting the required documentation along with your application, or not competently explaining options available to you in removal proceedings. If so, your attorney may have provided you with “ineffective assistance of counsel.” This article describes the remedies that are available to you and how you may be able to reopen your immigration case so you can still receive the immigration benefit that you originally applied for (or should have applied for).

If you are a noncitizen and you decide to hire one of the immigration lawyers in UK to represent you in a matter before Immigration Court or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), you have a due process right to competent representation. The attorney’s poor performance (or lack of performance) must have materially affected the outcome of the proceedings and have been so fundamentally unfair that it prevented you from reasonably presenting your case.

A classic example of ineffective assistance is when an attorney misses an important deadline that makes you ineligible for an immigration benefit. For example, your attorney disremembers to submit an application for asylum within one year of your arrival in the United States, and the asylum officer or Immigration Judge finds that you are ineligible because of an unreasonable delay in filing. He or she may have also completed forms incorrectly, made false statements on your behalf, or presented fake documents with your application. If this is the case, you might be able to get your immigration case “reopened” or be given the opportunity to submit a new application or additional evidence to support your petition for an immigration benefit.

An attorney’s catastrophe to inform clients about the immigration consequences of pleading guilty or no contest to criminal charges is also taken as ineffective assistance of immigration lawyers in UK. However, your criminal case must not be considered “final” (unable to be appealed on ineffective assistance grounds) in order to benefit.

If you come across a rejection of your immigration case, appeal, motion, or application, your attorney may seem like the natural person to blame. But don't be too quick to perceive that your attorney made mistakes just because you did not receive the benefit you requested. Sometimes an attorney does everything right, but your application is denied anyways. Immigration law can be very complicated and immigration officials and judges have discretionary powers to deny immigration benefits and relief whenever they see fit.

Other times, the immigration lawyers in UK may commit mistakes that aren’t enough to rise to the level of inadequate assistance of counsel, but may be enough for a complaint of attorney malpractice. In some cases, a simple mistake is not necessarily “ineffective assistance of counsel” or even enough evidence of malpractice.