Langtry, TX Immigration Law Firms & Lawyers

The name of your father on your passport will have no effect upon your admissibility to the U. S. under an H-1B visa. It is also not of major concern if you apply for your green card through employment. It may be more of a concern if you are applying for the green card through your father. In any event, the name of your father on your passport and on your birth paper should match when you are applying for the green card. Although not a rush, you should have the discrepancy taken care of sometime in the future. Due to the limitations of the Lawyers.com Forums, Alan Lee, Esq.'s (the "Firm") participation in responding to questions posted herein does not constitute legal advice, nor legal representation of the person or entity posting a question. No Attorney/Client relationship is or shall be construed to be created hereby. The information provided herein by the Firm is general, and requires that the poster obtain specific legal advice from an attorney. The poster shall not rely upon the information provided herein as legal advice nor as the basis for making any decisions of legal consequence.  

For immigration, if you are a USA citizen, you and he would prepare and file a stack of forms and documents with Homeland Security, which, in Houston, leads to a green card (assuming he's fully eligible) in about 90 days.

USCIS (or Immigration Court, if you are already under proceeding) will wait until the criminal charges against you will be resolved. If the charges will be dismissed, they will have no effect on the immigration process. It is a conviction that you have to worry about. Please understand that having any criminal conviction at all will not work in your favor. However, some convictions are simply fatal for immigration law purposes because they put many forms of relief from deportation out of your reach. The rules are very complicated, and very few criminal defense attorneys know them. In my practice, we very often see clients who, following advice of their criminal defense attorney, enter a guilty plea in exchange for reduced charges and no-jail sentence - just to be arrested by the Immigration & Customs Enforcement and find that their freshly imposed criminal conviction made them defenseless in removal proceedings. Even getting them bailed out of the immigration detention becomes very difficult - and, sometimes, impossible. So don't agree to plea guilty only because the offer sounds good. Do not go without an attorney to the criminal court, even if you are innocent (*especially* if you are innocent!). If you are being offered a plea deal, ask your attorney how will the resulting conviction affect your eligibility for relief from removal, and don't settle for anything but a specific answer. If you can, consult an immigration attorney before going to the criminal court and ask your criminal defense attorney to check any proposed plea with your immigration attorney (or find an attorney who defends immigrants in criminal court as his or her specialty).