General Practice Blog

If someone you love has been detained, the first thing you want to know is how to get them out. I am sorry you are reading this at all, and I will not pretend the current landscape is simple. The answer in 2026 begins with a question that has nothing to do with how sympathetic…

Students on OPT ask me some version of this constantly. Can I trade stocks? Can I run an automated trading strategy? Can I put money into crypto? What if I build the tool myself? The worry is understandable, and the answer is more permissive than most students expect. Trading your own money is not employment…

When a university researcher or instructor on H-1B loses a position, the advice they usually get is straightforward. You have 60 days of grace. Find a new employer, have them file, and you are fine. Losing a lab or a teaching line is disorienting enough without discovering that the standard advice does not apply to…

Automatic visa revalidation is one of the more generous provisions in the regulations, and it is also one of the most commonly misunderstood. Used correctly, it lets you take a short trip to Canada or Mexico with an expired visa in your passport and come back. Used carelessly, it strands you outside the country. If…

This one causes real damage, and it comes from an understandable assumption. You have an I-485 on file. You are waiting. Surely that means you are allowed to be here and allowed to work. Nobody should need three regulations to learn whether they may accept their own paycheck. What the pending application does give you…

Almost everyone who calls about a pending work visa extension is counting from the wrong day. The rule itself is simple. The date it runs from is not the one most people assume. Watching the wrong calendar while trying to work normally is a miserable way to spend a year. Where the clock actually starts…

There is a provision in the immigration statute that most people have never heard of, that closed to new filings a generation ago, and that still quietly rescues cases today. It is INA § 245(i). The question that unlocks it is simple. Did anyone ever file a visa petition or a labor certification for you…

This is one of the most painful conversations I have. A parent has been in the country for 15 or 20 years. Their children are U.S. citizens, grown, working, sometimes serving in the military. Someone tells them that because they have a citizen child, they can file the I-130, apply for the provisional waiver, go…

For more than two decades, Salvadoran families in this country have built their lives on Temporary Protected Status. Absent a court order or a new designation, TPS for El Salvador terminates September 9, 2026, and the people affected lose work authorization and protection from removal on that date. I understand that a deadline like this…

Immigration status and estate planning are usually handled by different people who never speak to each other. That works until someone dies, at which point the family discovers that the ordinary assumptions of American estate planning quietly stopped applying. The unlimited marital deduction has a citizenship requirement A U.S. citizen can leave an unlimited amount…