Comment by godelski
3 days ago
The visa is your entry document. The I-94 is your status document[0]. The visa outlines the conditions (including dates) you may enter the country. The I-94 is the record of entry/departure and dictate your required date of departure.
> This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
This is a completely different conversation and scenario that what was being previously discussed. There is a pretty significant difference between illegal border crossing vs overstaying your status. The latter never performed an illegal border crossing. These people are documented.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/forms/all-forms/form-i-94-arrivaldepar...
And I believe all of this conflation of entering the country illegally with overstaying a visa or violating the restrictions on a visa having passed through a Border Control checkpoint is at the heart of a lot of what's happening right now. The whole concept of "illegal immigration" was expanded to contain this other category of person who went through Border Control properly, they have a passport from their home country with a stamp or a visa, but they are not complying with the requirements of the visa or for the entry stamp. These people are not criminals and many of them have put down roots here and would be model citizens if they had citizenship.
Because ICE is having a lot of trouble finding enough people who crossed illegally to round up and put in concentration camps, they're scouring the country for people in the other category. And in many cases the threat of visa cancellation is being used to suppress political speech. A lot of people don't know that because they don't understand that there's a way to get here legally that doesn't involve getting citizenship or a green card. I think if you've never left the country it probably doesn't occur to you that there's a whole system of checkpoints that you can use to enter the country but almost zero control after that other than your own good faith efforts. And this is true just about everywhere else in the world.