Nicole Micheroni, a 40-year-old immigration attorney from Massachusetts, might have the most confounding task ahead. She has now received a notice from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) informing her that she must depart from the United States within seven days. The letter informing her that her “parole” had been terminated showed up in her official work email. Now, Micheroni is challenging its validity.
Micheroni, who focuses on immigration law, first assumed the notice was a phishing attempt. This email was quite different from the types of communications she usually sees from immigration agencies. At first, I thought it was a joke,” Micheroni remembered. Then I stopped and said, uh oh.
The notice was informing her that her parole was being revoked. This term is used in colloquial language to describe an immigration law that allows noncitizens to enter the United States temporarily. Even though she is a U.S. citizen, Micheroni thinks DHS still accidentally sent her this notice. She says she’s gotten no further communication from DHS since that first notice.
Even senior officials with DHS have admitted that CBP used public-facing email addresses to send notifications. CBP leveraged existing email addresses on record for the alien to email notices to,” said one official. This brings up issues involving potential misdirection of notices, especially where email addresses were not personal in nature. “If a non-personal email — such as an American citizen contact — was provided by the alien, notices may have been sent to unintended recipients,” the official added.
Micheroni’s case raises important concerns about the notification process that ICE has adopted. As fellow immigration attorney Carmen Bello noted, that would open the door to ignoring the channels altogether. They’re not even verifying that it’s the attorney’s email or the applicant’s email,” Bello pointed out.
While Micheroni waits to figure out what this means from federal officials, her future is very much up in the air. Only days are left before the deadline written in the advance. This perfect political storm points to the overwhelming obstacles that lawyers and their clients have to overcome, the everyday realities of the broken immigration system.