As a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Technology Committee I have been fortunate enough to see the behind-the-scenes workings of the transformation of AILA’s superb Infonet forum on Compuserve into a web site that members can access over the Internet from any Internet Service Provider. The new Infonet bwill officially be rolling out on June 1st and members attending the annual AILA meeting in Houston next month will be able to get a hands-on tour. The migration of Infonet to the Web was an incredibly large task and our hats off go to AILA staff professionals and volunteers who are making this happen.

AILA reports that it is developing software that will make it possible for the association’s members to access OES wage data that is used to determine prevailing wages in H-1B and labor certification cases. AILA has already been supplied with the raw data from OES, but the data cannot be accessed without the development of custom software by AILA. Members will be notified when AILA completes this project.

The US District Court in Alaska recently dismissed an indictment against a green card holder charged with re-entering the US after he was deported. The case was dismissed after the court found that the deportation hearing by which the alien was originally deported violated his due process rights. The 1996 Immigration Act and the Anti-Terrorism Act’s changes to Section 212(c) application to conduct occurring before the new laws were enacted violated due process, according to the District Court. The INS takes the position, however, that the order of deportation remains valid even if it is unconstitutional for criminal purposes. Ms. Margaret Stock, an AILA member, has filed a habeas petition for the alien and is seeking other attorneys who have had similar cases. Her telephone number is 907-276-1600 and her fax number is 907-276-1776.

As noted above, in the middle of next month, AILA will hold its annual meeting in Houston, Texas. The meeting, in my opinion, is the single most important event of the year for any immigration lawyer. The CLE programs are superb (you can get two years’ worth at this one meeting alone) providing separate tracks for new immigration lawyers, advance tracks and programs on advocacy and practice management skills. I will be on a panel on legal ethics in the electronic age and invite any readers of this newsletter attending the meeting to attend that session. For more information on the annual meeting, go to the AILA web site at http://www.aila.org.