A working through of how immigration representation is authorized, priced, and documented in the United States, put together by one person who got tired of guessing. Every claim here points back to the rule or roster it came from, so check the date before you rely on it.
The single most expensive habit in immigration practice is treating the search for a lawyer as the first step. It is usually the third or fourth. By the time most people sit down in a consultation, at least one clock has been running for a week or two, and several of those clocks cannot be restarted by anyone, including a very good attorney. The dates are almost always printed on the paper already in hand. They are just printed in the places nobody reads first: the header, the last paragraph, the back of the notice.
The clocks that start with a piece of mail
First, the change of address obligations. A noncitizen must report a new address to the Department of Homeland Security within ten days of moving, on Form AR-11, and separately to the immigration court on Form EOIR-33 within five days, because the two systems do not share address records reliably. Second, the hearing date on a Notice to Appear, or the date on the later notice of hearing that supersedes it. A careful reader checks whether the notice lists an actual date and time or the placeholder language that a later notice will supply them, and then checks whether that later notice went to the old address.
Third, the response date on a Request for Evidence. USCIS prints a specific deadline on the notice, and the clock is not a round number of months: it is whatever date appears in that box, calculated from the issuance date, not from the day the envelope reached the mailbox. Fourth, a Notice of Intent to Deny, which typically allows a much shorter window than an RFE. Both are unforgiving in the same way. The agency treats the printed date as the date received, and evidence arriving the next morning is evidence arriving after a decision has already been drafted.
The clocks tied to a status, not a notice
Fifth, the asylum filing deadline. An application must generally be filed within one year of the last arrival in the United States, and the exceptions for changed or extraordinary circumstances are real but narrow, argued rather than assumed. Sixth, the conditional resident window: a joint petition to remove conditions on residence is filed during the ninety days before the two-year card expires, not after, and not whenever the fee is affordable. Both of these run quietly. Nothing arrives in the mail to warn you, which is exactly why they are missed more often than the ones with a notice attached.
The clocks that run after a decision
Seventh, an appeal from an immigration judge to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which must be received, not postmarked, within thirty calendar days of the oral or written decision. The distinction between mailed and received has ended more cases than any argument on the merits. Eighth, a grant of voluntary departure, which carries its own period, usually sixty or one hundred twenty days, and converts automatically into a removal order with a penalty attached if the departure does not happen. Ninth, a motion to reopen an in absentia order, generally one hundred eighty days from the order where the absence was due to exceptional circumstances, and without a time limit where notice was never properly served.
What a careful reader checks first
Take the notice and find four things before anything else: the issuance date, the deadline date, the address the agency believes is yours, and the specific form or filing the notice demands in response. Then check which clock the deadline belongs to, because filing the wrong thing on time is closer to failure than filing the right thing late. The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department component that runs the immigration courts, publishes its own filing instructions and practice manual, and those instructions govern format, service and timing in ways that differ from USCIS practice. Reading both is not optional if a case sits in both systems.
The useful move, once the dates are written down, is to bring them to the consultation rather than expecting the consultation to discover them. An attorney told the deadline is nine days away can triage accordingly, filing a placeholder, requesting an extension where one exists, or preparing a motion that preserves the record. An attorney who learns it on day twelve is doing something harder and less likely to work.
Most of these dates are recoverable if they are seen in time, and seeing them costs nothing but an hour with the paper.