Can USCIS rescind my green card even after more than five years?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. So in this video, we're talking about where someone has been granted lawful permanent residence status and for some reason USCIS wants to rescind or cancel or revoke the green card.
Now, generally there's a rule that says that if USCIS wants to do that, they have to do it within the first five years. But I have seen tons and tons of situations where USCIS has tried to do an end run around that by putting the person into removal proceedings. And this could be removal proceedings after the person travels abroad, or it could just be straight out, flat out a rescission motion or revocation motion or a green card challenge in immigration court.
In other words, they could issue someone a notice to appear and say, "Hey, we gave you this green card by mistake. Yeah, it might be more than five years, but you should be deported because you never should have got that in the first place. And Oh yeah, you lied when we gave you the green card."
So this five year rule on rescission, we always raise it as a defense, but it doesn't seem to get much mileage. It doesn't seem to be something that the judges or the ICE Council take much stock in. There's a lot of different ways to get you out of the country and I don't think you can put too much stock in that five year rescission rule. To me, it's pretty meaningless so far. In many of the cases that we've had, that's just sort of been ignored. And if they want to deport someone, they're going to put you in deportation.
And the thing is, even if you're right, even if they do have only five years to rescind someone's green card, you're still in immigration court. We don't get to pick where we go. We don't get to say, "Oh, hey, you guys shouldn't have put us in immigration court." I mean, we argue that, but you're still in immigration court. That's where you're arguing it.
So I don't think you can put too much stock in the fact that USCIS waited more than five years to try to rescind your green card or to take it away through deportation proceedings. So that's the real trick is they just put you in deportation and that's the end of that. You certainly have your right to defense and you can argue all the reasons why you were properly granted your green card. But at the end of the day, you don't have much leg to stand on and you're doing all that arguing, like I said, in immigration court.
So we hope you found this video helpful. We hope you're not in rescission proceedings or deportation proceedings, but if you are and you need our help, give us a call, 314-961-8200. You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, it's called Immigrant Home. We'd love to see you in there. We share a lot of good immigration information in there every day.
And if you liked this video, we ask that you subscribe to our YouTube channel and join me on LinkedIn so that we can spread the word, let you know whenever we have new videos just like this one. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
