Slatton & Hass Immigration Advocates, LLC

10/11/2026

If you checked your USCIS case status in the last two weeks and saw that the next step is no longer an interview but “adjudication,” you are one of a very large group of people.

Here is the honest picture. USCIS has not explained the change. ASAP, one of the most careful organizations working on asylum, says plainly that it is new and that they do not yet know what it means. Anyone telling you with confidence what it means for your case is guessing.

What we can tell you is what it is not. It is not a denial. It is not a referral to immigration court. It is not a cancelled interview. It is not a decision. And it is not a fast track, in either direction. We have continued to see clients receive interview notices after their status changed.

What is actually in your control is the strength of your application. For years, the standard practice was to file a short application and send the evidence later, once an interview was scheduled. That approach does not fit the rules as they are now. If the written record alone can decide where a case goes, the record has to tell the whole story.

And bigger is not better. A strong case is thorough, not thick. Every page should prove something.

We wrote the whole thing out here:

Pending affirmative asylum applicants saw their USCIS status change from an interview step to adjudication. What is known, what is not, and what is worth doing.

10/09/2026

On Thursday afternoon in Marble Hill, a five-year-old boy sat in the back seat of his father’s car while a federal officer fired seven rounds at it.

The boy was not hit. His father was shot in the neck and is expected to survive. Police found the child and placed him with a family member.

He was not injured. But unharmed describes his body, not what happened to him.

I have a son. As parents, the fear underneath everything is not that something will happen to us. It is that our children will see something we could not protect them from, and that they will carry it.

Immigration enforcement does this to families every day in quieter ways. Children come home to an empty chair. They learn to wait for a phone call from a detention center. They find out far too young that the people they love can be taken out of their lives between breakfast and dinner.

What happened in Marble Hill is the loudest version of that same harm.

I have written up what is known so far, what the government says, what the use of force rules actually require, and the practical things a family can do if federal agents approach their car. That last part is the section I least wanted to write.

My thoughts and my anger are with that family.

Read our full blog: https://slattonhasslaw.com/blog/a-five-year-old-watched-ice-agents-shoot-his-father/

10/09/2026

The sentence I hear most often from people who turn out to have an option available to them is some version of: I already checked. A lawyer told me there was nothing I could do.

That was almost always true when they were told it.

An immigration screening is a question asked about one particular set of facts under one particular set of rules. The answer is only good for as long as both of those hold still, and neither one holds still for very long.

The law moves in both directions. When a federal court in Rhode Island vacated the policies behind the benefits and asylum freeze, people who had been denied or left in limbo under them had something to act on that they did not have the week before. When the agency changed how it calculates a child’s age under the Child Status Protection Act in 2023, some children who had been told years earlier that they aged out were no longer aged out. It closes doors too. After the Board’s decision in Matter of Delcarmen-Lara, travel on advance parole is no longer safe in the same way it was under long-standing precedent, and a plan made under the old rule is not automatically still a good plan. Nobody calls to tell you that.

But the larger source of newly available options is not the law at all. It is ordinary life, which people do not think of as legally relevant. A child turns 21 and can petition for a parent as an immediate relative, with no waiting line at all. A relative naturalizes and a category changes with them. A priority date from 2007 that felt hopeless in 2015 reaches the front of the line. Something happened to someone, and it turns out to have an immigration category attached to it that nobody ever mentioned.

A screening is also not only about finding options. It catches risk: a permanent resident who has been eligible to naturalize for years and has not, travel that is quietly creating a problem, an address of record that is out of date at an agency about to mail something that matters.

Most of the time, after a careful look, the answer will still be no. That is a real result and it is worth having. Knowing the answer is still no means you are not vulnerable to the next person who offers you something different for a fee. It means you know which single fact would change your case, so you recognize the moment when it arrives.

I wrote up what a screening actually checks, what to bring to one, and the two questions worth asking at the end.

An answer you were given two years ago was an answer about the law and the facts as they were then. Both move. What a periodic immigration screening actually checks, and the things people wrongly assume rule them out.

09/28/2026

If the law firm handling your immigration case goes out of business, your case does not go with it.

The file is yours, not the firm's. The deadlines keep running whether or not anyone is answering the phone. And you can find out exactly where your case stands on your own, for free, today.

Our new post walks through it plainly:

How to ask for your complete file, and who to call when nobody answers
Checking your case status at USCIS and your next hearing date at the immigration court
Why updating your address matters more than almost anything else right now
Getting back money you paid for work that was never done
What the paperwork looks like when a new attorney steps in
Asking the judge for time, and your right to appear on your own

A firm closing is an administrative problem. It is not a decision on your case.

https://slattonhasslaw.com/blog/your-case-does-not-close-when-the-firm-does

09/21/2026

Free detention resources, all in one place.

If someone you love is detained by immigration, the first hours are confusing. People are moved, phones are taken, and families are left calling around with no information. We wrote out everything we tell families in those calls and put it on one page, free, with nothing to sign up for: slattonhasslaw.com/detention-help

You will find guides on the first 48 hours after an arrest, how to use the ICE detainee locator, your rights in detention, preparing for a bond hearing, habeas corpus, immigration court while detained, how to send calls, mail and money, mental health support, pro bono and low cost attorneys in the DMV, and our family support group.

Our 24 hour detention line is 240-891-4343.

And if nothing has happened yet, that is the best time to make a plan. Our free Detention Preparedness Kit helps your family decide in advance who picks up the children, where the documents are kept, who can get to the money, and which phone number everyone memorizes: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1_N5_2BSUJDnxO7olRD9EnQRaoz98yxZJ

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09/18/2026

09/15/2026

📅 REMINDER: Our free Detention Preparedness Workshop is this Friday!

Friday, September 18 at 2:30 PM
In person or livestream right here on Facebook
English with Spanish translation

Nobody wants to think about detention. But a plan made ahead of time makes a real difference, for your case and for your family. Our partners will walk through:
✔️ Who picks up your children from school
✔️ Where your important documents are, and who outside your home has a copy
✔️ How medical needs and money are handled
✔️ What friends and neighbors can do to help

Bring what you have and start your own plan in the room. Free printed Detention Preparedness Kits in English and Spanish will be available.

Walk-ins are welcome, no screening. Register to get the location by email:
https://slattonhasslaw.com/detention-preparedness-workshop

Can't make it? Watch live here on Facebook, no registration needed. Please share with someone who could use this. 💜

09/11/2026

Important news for Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

On September 10, the federal appeals court that covers our five states ruled that people who have lived in the United States for years can ask an immigration judge for a bond hearing if ICE detains them, no matter how they first entered the country.

The case was brought by two men from the Washington area. Oscar Enrique Lopez Garcia came from Guatemala as a child in 1996, has lived and worked here for more than thirty years, and has two children who are U.S. citizens. ICE picked him up on his way to work. Juan Jose Rivera came from El Salvador in 2005, has worked here for twenty years, and has never been charged with a crime. Both were held in Virginia with no bond hearing at all, and the government never claimed either man was dangerous or likely to run.

Since July 2025, the government has been holding many people like them with no bond hearing. The court said the law does not allow that. It also pointed out that for almost thirty years, the government read the law the other way, and that more than 500 federal trial courts around the country had already rejected the new reading.

The State of Maryland joined other states in filing a brief supporting the two men.

What this means, and what it does not:

A bond hearing is your chance to ask a judge to let you out while your case continues. It is not automatic release. The judge still looks at things like whether you are likely to come to court.

The ruling covers people who have been living here for years. If you arrived more recently, your situation may be different.

This could still change. The government can ask for further review, and the U.S. Supreme Court is set to consider later this month whether to take up the question.

If you or someone you love is detained, talk to an immigration attorney about your options. Our 24-hour detention line is 240-891-4343.

See where every state stands on our updated map:
https://slattonhasslaw.com/rights-by-circuit/

09/09/2026

If you just got an RFE from USCIS, please read this before you panic.

An RFE, a Request for Evidence, is not a denial. It is a list of questions.

Our founder Victoria Slatton spent years as an asylum officer at DHS before she started this firm, and she is the one who sent these letters. In her words: most of the RFEs she sent went out because she wanted to approve the case and was missing one piece. A document. A date that did not match another date. One more record to establish a relationship.

Here is what most people do not realize. Saying no is easier. If an officer had already decided against you, writing the request, mailing it, holding your file, and reading your response weeks later would be a lot of extra work for a decision they could have made that day. The fact that they asked tells you something.

We wrote a plain language guide to answering one well. The short version:

Put your name, A-number, and receipt number on every page so nobody has to guess who you are. Write a cover letter that goes item by item in the same order as their list. Answer everything, even the parts you think you already sent, because a partial response can be treated as asking them to decide on what they already have. Read the deadline off your own notice, not off what someone else's said. If you are mailing it, get a tracking number. Then follow up and confirm it actually arrived.

09/08/2026

Reminder: our free Detention Preparedness Workshop is Friday, September 18 at 2:30 PM.

We will start with why preparation matters to a case. When someone is detained, building their defense gets harder for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits. Documents sit in a house nobody can get into. Nobody else knows the dates and details of their history. Signatures often need to be original, which is hard to arrange from inside a facility.

Then we will cover the practical side people rarely plan for. Who collects the children from school. Who holds your emergency contacts. How medical needs and prescriptions are handled. How money reaches someone in detention. And who outside your household has a copy of everything, because a plan that lives only in your home does not help when your home is the problem.

We will close with the free resources we give away, and show you how to use each one rather than just handing them to you. This is a working session, so bring what you have and you can start filling out your own plan in the room. Partners Victoria Slatton, Ashley Hass, and Jack Goodman are presenting, in English with Spanish translation, and everyone leaves with a printed Detention Preparedness Kit.

Register here and we will email you the location:

https://slattonhasslaw.com/detention-preparedness-workshop/