Disclaimer and attorney advertising
This website is advertising. It is written to be genuinely useful, but it is general information about the immigration consequences of criminal charges and pleas, not advice about your case or your plea, and reading it does not make us your lawyers.
Attorney advertising
This website is attorney advertising under New York Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1 and Florida Bar Rule 4-7.13. Usher Law Group, P.C. publishes it to describe what we do and to explain how the immigration consequences of a criminal case work. We follow the advertising rules of both the New York and Florida bars on every page here.
The attorney responsible for the content of this site is Mikhail Usher, Esq., managing attorney, Usher Law Group, P.C., 1600 Sheepshead Bay Rd, Suite 203, Brooklyn, NY 11235, (718) 484-7510, info@usherlegal.com.
This is not legal advice
Every page on this site describes the law in general terms. Whether a plea triggers a ground of removal turns on specific things: the exact statute and subsection you plead to, the elements of that statute as the courts in your circuit read them, the sentence the judge imposes including any suspended part, the date of the offense, what the record of conviction says, your immigration status and how you got it, and every prior disposition on your record. General information cannot account for any of that.
Do not accept or reject a plea, make a filing, miss a deadline, or sign anything based on something you read here. Talk to a lawyer about your own facts. If you have a criminal defense lawyer, that lawyer has a duty under Padilla v. Kentucky to advise you about the immigration consequences of a plea; ask for that advice in writing, and bring it to an immigration lawyer if it is unclear.
About the plea tool
The plea consequences tool on this site is an educational aid. It applies general rules, each of which is drawn from the statute or from published precedent, to the offense category, sentence, offense date and status you select. It does not read the statute you are charged under, and it does not read the record of conviction. It reasons about categories, not statutes, because whether a particular state statute matches a federal definition is decided under the categorical approach, statute by statute and circuit by circuit.
The answer in a real case can differ from what the tool shows, in either direction. A category the tool marks as triggering a ground may not, once the statute is analyzed. A category it marks as not triggering may, once the record is read. The tool says "triggers," "likely triggers," "depends," or "does not trigger on the facts entered." It never says you will be removed and it never says you are safe, because it cannot know either.
No plea should be accepted or rejected on the basis of the tool alone. Use it to learn the questions, to see which thresholds matter, and to prepare for a conversation with a lawyer. Then have that conversation.
No attorney-client relationship until a signed retainer
Reading this site does not make you our client. Neither does running the plea tool, sending us a form, an email, or a text message, and neither does a free plea review. An attorney-client relationship with Usher Law Group, P.C. begins only when we and you sign a written retainer agreement that says what we are handling and what it costs.
This matters for a practical reason. Until that agreement exists, we are not tracking your dates. If you have a plea date, a sentencing date, a post-conviction deadline, or a hearing in immigration court coming up, it remains yours and your criminal lawyer's to protect until a signed retainer says otherwise.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome
Anything this site says about past matters describes what happened in those matters and nothing more. Outcomes vary by the statute, by the record, by the circuit, by the prosecutor, by the judge, and by law that continues to move. Nothing here is a prediction or a promise about your case, and no lawyer can honestly give you one. In particular, no page on this site and no result from the tool is a promise that a particular plea will avoid a particular consequence.
The law changes, and these pages carry a date
The rules that decide what a plea does are made in several places at once: the statute, the regulations, precedent decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals and the Attorney General, the Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals, and the sentencing laws of each state. Any of them can move. A page that was accurate last quarter can be wrong now.
Every page that states a threshold, a deadline, a definition, or a statistic shows a "Current as of" date under its heading, and the tool shows its own. Read that date. If it is old, or if your plea date is close, confirm the point with a lawyer or against the primary source before you rely on it. We re-check these pages on a schedule and after any rule change, and the tool changes when the pages do, but no website is a substitute for checking your own case.
Government filing fees are not legal fees
When this site names a dollar amount, it says what it is. Filing fees go to USCIS or to the Department of Justice. We never receive them, we cannot waive them, and we cannot refund them. Where we have not verified the current amount of a government fee, we do not print a figure at all; we say that a fee applies and link the official schedule. Dollar figures that appear as statutory thresholds, such as a loss amount in the aggravated felony definition, are not fees of any kind. Our legal fees are separate, are quoted to you individually, and are confirmed in writing before we start work.
About the photographs on this site
The photographs on this site are digitally created. They are illustrative. They do not depict actual clients, actual matters, or actual events, and no image here should be read as a representation about a real case.
The attorneys shown in them are our attorneys, rendered from their own likenesses. Every other person in an image is not a client and is not a real person. Where an image shows an attorney with someone, that meeting did not happen. We use these images because we will not put a photograph of an actual client on a public website, and we will not put a stranger from a stock library on the site and let you assume it is us.
The three attorney portraits on our firm page are photographs of those attorneys. They are the only images on this site that are not digitally created.
Who is admitted where
Here are the state bar admissions:
- Mikhail Usher, Esq., managing attorney, is admitted in New York, New Jersey and Florida.
- Alexander Susi, Esq., is admitted in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
- Mitchell Bromberg, Esq., is admitted in New Jersey and New York.
Immigration practice is federal. The immigration courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals and USCIS are federal tribunals and agencies, and an attorney admitted in any state may appear before them. That is why we advise on the immigration consequences of a criminal case from anywhere in the United States, and represent people in removal proceedings throughout the country and its territories, without being admitted in that state. Petitions for review in the federal courts of appeals are filed by an attorney admitted to that court, or with local counsel.
The criminal case is different. Criminal defense is state-law practice, and the firm's criminal defense practice handles matters in the courts where our attorneys are admitted. Elsewhere, we advise your criminal defense lawyer on the immigration side and that lawyer handles the plea. A post-conviction motion is filed in the criminal court by a lawyer admitted there. If your question is not an immigration question, ask us and we will tell you plainly whether we can take it.
Translated pages
The language selector on this site runs machine translation. It is a convenience so that you can get the gist of a page in a language you read more comfortably. It is not attorney-reviewed, it is not a legal translation, and machine translation regularly gets legal terms wrong in ways that change the meaning. The tool's labels translate with the page; its rules do not, and the summary it copies is in English.
The English version of every page controls. If a translated page and the English page say different things, the English page is the one we stand behind. When it matters, ask us and we will explain it to you in English, Russian, Spanish or Uzbek in-house, or through a live interpreter in another language.
If you have a question about anything on this page, call (718) 484-7510 or email info@usherlegal.com. See also our privacy policy and our accessibility statement.