Student Protests

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From the video...

Hello. Yifei He, your immigration and criminal defense lawyer today. I, I’ll be talking about the recent protests on the college campuses as it relates to criminal charges for the students involved in particular. I wanna emphasize that if you’re a student and you get arrested for, for these protests, the consequences can be severe and they can impact your future status as a student. The consequences are particularly severe if you are an international student. And as you know, I do immigration laws. So a lot of my clients are immigrants. Everybody wants to come to the US. It’s a great country. There’s freedom of expression, this First Amendment rights. But unfortunately, the law is not so loose with immigrants. Uh if you’re an international student and you’re protesting on one of these campuses and you get arrested, an arrest alone can jeopardize your immigration status. The Department of State, the agency that issues visas to international students have the ability to revoke and that means cancel your visa just for an arrest, not for a conviction but for an arrest. And I’ve uh done some outreach and I’ve spoken to a couple individuals up at the Department of state. And they told me that generally when they consider whether or not to vote someone’s visas, they defer to the law enforcement agencies. And that means that if they receive information, advert information from, say, for example, the police or the courts that you’ve been arrested, they have the discretion to revoke your visa. And what does revoke your visa mean that means that if you travel outside of the US, you can’t even come back to fight your criminal case. So not only would you be guilty of a crime which you haven’t even been adjudicated of a crime for? You would not, you wouldn’t jeopardize your future as a student, as your uh as a successful student in the US, you would be unable to come back to fight your case and you would have tons of problems down the road. You’d be disappointing everybody back home. So what I, what I’m trying to get at is you have to be very careful as an international student on these, join these protests because you might think that you join the crowd. You might think that you’re, you’re exercising your first minimum rights. However, there are laws in place there, there are dire consequences involved if you were to get arrested and if that information were to be transmitted to the authorities, if any questions just contact me. I’m an immigration and criminal defense lawyer. If you have, if you have been arrested, if you’re unsure of the consequences. Or if you just have any questions regarding the situation, reach out, my contact information is uh posted and I’ll be glad to speak with you. Thank you very much.

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