Letter from the Editor-in-chief

• Publication year: 2020

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

I am pleased to bring you the Fall 2020 issue of the AILA Law Journal. I am grateful to Managing Editor Danielle Polen, Full Court Press Publisher Morgan Morrissette Wright, and members of the Board of Editors who worked tirelessly to read, select, and edit articles during the long days of the COVID-19 summer, albeit within a short timeframe. Thanks, too, to the editorial expertise of Richard Link, Kritika Agarwal, and Paige Britton. I am thrilled to showcase six articles in this volume who, together, cover a wide range of immigration topics beyond borders.

In their article "Acquiring and Presenting Digital Evidence in Immigration Practice," Andrew H. Wellisch and Gabriela M. Pinto Vega provide an innovative analysis of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 and link it to how it applies to presenting digital evidence in the immigration space. Sarah J. Diaz describes the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and its intersection with immigration law in her piece entitled "Hague Abduction Law for the Contemporary Immigrant Parent and Child." The article illuminates the issues so that immigration practitioners can think critically about the relationship between the Hague Convention and the immigrant parent and child.

In her article "From Caravans to the Courts: A Practical Guide to Matter of A—B—'s Implication for Transgender Women of the Northern Triangle," Sarah Houston proposes an alternate framework for practitioners to use for overcoming the highly controversial Matter of A—B— decision when representing transgender women who often suffer gang- and gender-based violence on account of their gender identity. Kaelyn M. Mostafa, in her piece entitled "The Effect of States' Legalization of Marijuana on Good Moral Character and Eligibility for U.S. Citizenship," explores the legal injustices suffered by green card holders in the wake of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' (USCIS) April 2019 policy directing immigration officers to deny citizenship to immigrants employed in state-legal marijuana industries, and ultimately recommends legislation.

In her article "ITServe Alliance v. Cissna: A Victory—Perhaps Temporary—for H-1B Beneficiaries and Petitioners," Kaitlyn Box provides an overview of USCIS memoranda laying out new criteria about the factors to weigh to determine a qualifying "employer-employee relationship" for H-1B petitions and litigation that followed. Box examines the limits...