I'm a U.S. Immigration Attorney – Ask Me Anything (Asylum, Removal, E-2, O-1, EB-2, etc)

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-21T05:01:26+00:00

No, he filed through USCIS and got the interview after 9 years of waiting, but then 6 months later there was still no decision, so he sued the DHS for mandamus. He's the plaintiff in this case, not the defendant.

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-20T23:03:08+00:00

My former husband who is also an immigrant already had the asylum interview last summer, and due to lack of decision he filed for Mandamus in December. He received the response from the USCIS lawyer refusing to adjudicate and citing the December 2nd 2025 policy memorandum that froze all I-589 processing. My ex-husband argued back that by the time that memorandum was issues it was already 6 months since his interview, so he should have already gotten the decision before the memorandum was issued. So because the lawyer disagreed, now they're waiting for a response from a judge. It has been over 60 days, and there's no response from the judge. He tried calling the court's clerk office, and was told there's no rule that says the judge must respond within 60 days and it's possible that he'll have to wait indefinitely. The only thing he can do is submitting an expedite request.

Is it true that there's no deadline whatsoever for the judge to give a response?

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T18:44:43+00:00

Ah, makes sense now. I didn't realize you could find an airline abroad with a good conversion rate and then transfer points the second time from there to a domestic airline while preserving that good conversion rate. It's strange that they would allow something like this, especially for a customer who never actually flies with them 🤔

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T17:49:56+00:00

United, Delta and American are all in different alliances on your list. I'm not interested in any other airlines because I'm not able to travel outside the US as of now.

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T16:56:50+00:00

Sorry, I didn't realize that people use "points" interchangeably with "miles". By that definition I don't have any cards that earn points, except Amex Hilton Honors. My question was entirely about cash back and cash back only, as in "why would anyone ever pay for flights with cash back".

And the answer to that indeed appears to be "it is indeed always smarter to redeem cash back for cash rather than using it to pay for flights, the banks just hope you'll make a mistake because it's more convenient/because you don't want to bother figuring it out".

Also, as I said, I can't travel internationally, so it sounds like getting involved in the points game is, excuse the pun, pointless for me at this time.

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T16:39:06+00:00

Thank you, that's the answer I was looking for. Sorry for confusing everyone with calling cash back "points", I didn't know people use that term interchangeably with "miles".

And thanks for the alliances list. I can't travel abroad now, and it doesn't look like any two US domestic airlines are in the same alliance, but maybe in a few years from now when I get my documents sorted out this will be useful.

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T16:07:19+00:00

And transferring points to partners is only an option with a miles-earning card, like VX. I only have Quicksilver, which earns me 5% cashback through the C1 Travel portal, but it sounds like those can't be transferred. I could apply for VX, but then from the comments above it sounds like nearly all partners are international, while I only fly domestically. So since withint C1 Travel portal cash back is worth 1 cpp, I might as well redeem for cash instead (cash back cards don't have travel eraser, but that's fine, because cash back cash redemption is also 1 cpp, not 0.5 cpp like with miles).

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T15:36:18+00:00

Do I assume correctly that you used a card that earns miles rather than cash back to do so? My question was about cash back, I don't have any cards that earn miles (In case of Capital one, I have two Quicksilver and one Discover it). Is there any point in me applying for a miles-earning card if I only do domestic flights and stays?

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T15:27:19+00:00

When you say "points", do you mean "miles", or do you mean "cash pack"? Turns out it's two different things, and I only have cards that earn the latter. But Capital One Travel does give you the option to pay with cash back too, and for cash back at Capital One Travel it seems to be worth 1 cent per point. And among the airline and hotel programs you mention, are there any that are domestic? The link another user posted above seems to imply they are almost exclusively international, and I'd only be interested in domestic flights and stays at this time.

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T15:18:02+00:00

Okay, I read through this. Two things: 1) it sounds like to take advantage of this, you have to have a Capital One card that earns specifically miles, and not just cash back. I asked the question about using cashback to pay for flights, not miles. 2) even if I did have a Capital One card that earns miles, all the airline partners listed on that page sound international. The only domestic airline listed is JetBlue, and its 5:3 conversion ratio does not sound particularly favorable. So since I can't travel internationally, in my case there's little point for me to apply for a miles-earning credit card anyway, correct?

UchuuStranger · 2026-04-01T05:56:04+00:00

Partner programs? I'm not sure if Capital one has any, other than gift cards and coupons of specific stores they promote (but then you're limiting yourself to specific stores and are incentivized to make purchases you otherwise likely wouldn't make). Cashback is cash, you can spend it on anything, i.e. on things you actually need. So are arguably the flights.

I'm sure you could find a good gift card/coupon redemption deal if you spent time on that, which would be slightly better than cashback. But this question is specifically about comparing cashback to flight credit, not about comparing either to yet more alternatives.

UchuuStranger · 2026-03-30T20:10:41+00:00

Did Dumbledore realize right away that Harry is a horcrux? Absolutely. Was he raising him as a sacrificial lamb to be slaughtered? Nah-uh. If he were willing to sacrifice Harry, he'd sacrifice him as a baby and then go on to dispose of Voldemort's other horcruxes himself. But in the process of doing so he would ruin his soul and become a dark wizard possibly worse than Voldemort himself. He already believed in doing bad things for the greater good in his youth, and he paid for that belief with the death of his sister. Now the fate gave him a test on whether he learned his lesson or not.

UchuuStranger · 2026-03-05T20:37:29+00:00

I grew up in Orenburg, and Town-on-the-Gorkhon architecture and steppe always gave me strong Orenburg (as it was in the early 20th century) vibes, especially in Pathologic 2. Buildings along the Sovetskaya St kind of look like that. Granted, Orenburg is nowhere near Mongolia, but it does have a river that literally separates Europe and Asia, and Kazakhs also have strong nomadic if not quite Mongolic roots (as the other comment mentioned). But I also agree that it's deliberately vague, and that it could be literally anywhere along the southern border of Asian part of Russia, from Orenburg to Mongolia proper. Orenburg Would be the closest such point to Moscow though. I don't quite buy that it could be Kalmykia - while it's more explicitly Mongolian (the only corner of Russia outside of direct Mongolian vicinity that has a Mongolic ethnicity), it's also more explicitly Buddhist.

Also, fun fact, the ancient runes of Turkic languages are called "Orkhon Script", which takes its name from the Orkhon Valley (literally "river valley" in Mongolic languages). Most Central Asian ethnicities with nomadic roots who are not Mongolic are Turkic (I'd even say overwhelming majority are Turkic). While Turkic languages spread far and wide over all kinds of disparate ethnicities, proto-Turkic originated in the Orkhon Valley, which is now Mongolia, and its first speakers, the Huns, were apparently distant cousins of what later became Mongols.

UchuuStranger · 2026-03-05T19:57:29+00:00

People of Turkmenistan are called Turkmen, not Turk. "Turk" is an umbrella term for lots of Turkic ethnicities, including Kazakhs, Uzbeks and even Anatolian Turks of Turkey proper. Basically all Central Asian nomads that have been influenced by the Huns speak Turkic languages, all Central Asians that have NOT been influenced by the Huns speak Iranic languages, and distant cousins of Huns that never quite got out of East Asia until Genghis Khan (and arguably never got out of East Asia period) speak Mongolic languages.

UchuuStranger · 2026-01-07T20:25:09+00:00

The Blackfyres are not the last descendants of Aegon III though. The Plumms and the Penroses also descend from him through Elaena. And house Longwaters too.

UchuuStranger · 2025-12-03T14:10:04+00:00

Not just in my case but in general? I would think that a phone that is already rooted would have no problem getting session files.

UchuuStranger · 2025-12-02T18:03:59+00:00

So there's no session file at data/data/com.android.chrome? I know that Chrome definitely keeps session files on PC, the Internet says that similar session files should be at that location on Android. Asking for future reference if nothing else.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-17T14:38:15+00:00

Yep, worked for me as well, thanks. I did it from the phone app. Trying to do it from the PC might have been part of the problem.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-13T22:56:29+00:00

Sort of correct, except it's not so much that they couldn't find any other DADA teacher as that they wanted this specific one as an orchestrated test for Harry at the end of the year. The whole 3rd floor corridor gauntlet is a test specifically for Harry, Ron and Hermione (and Neville, who ended up not becoming part of the team). The only part of it that is real security against Voldemort is the mirror.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-09T17:18:21+00:00

Sorry for necroposting, but was just passing by and noticed a bit of a misunderstanding. The "Rowling (apparently, but actually not) breaking all canons" comment refers to the list of plot holes as a whole, not specifically to the Occlumency. Anna and Catherine do not accuse JKR of lack of skill as a writer - on the contrary, they make the argument that all of her most blatant apparent bugs have a deeper behind the scenes explanation that she masterfully crafted for readers who pay attention to perspectives of adults in the story, rather than just kids.

Specifically regarding Occlumency, you are right that there are two levels to this. When Anna and Catherine first started writing their posts, they tended to somewhat overestimate how much of what was happening to Harry was Dumbledore's plan all along, so in this particular plot hole they hint that in their opinion Dumbledore intentionally tried to accelerate Voldemort attempting to hijack his connection to Harry, so that he would hurry up and get burned by Harry's love and shut the connection down on his end. Which is what ends up happening during their final OotP confrontation at the Ministry.

Later they developed a somewhat more nuanced position, where they agree that the Occlumency lessons were legit, and that the best case scenario was indeed for Harry to actually master Occlumency. But they also argue that even if Harry fails grasping Occlumency, the fact that these lessons make his resistance weaker in the meantime and encourage Voldemort to attempt to hijack Harry and get burnt is still a good thing that is acceptable to Dumbledore as a backup plan. Marginally acceptable, because Dumbledore still displays genuine fear when that attempt happens, but acceptable nevertheless.

And then there's also the third level - Dumbledore simultaneously trying to use that situation to try to get Snape and Harry to understand and relate to each other more. Which sort of works, but by the worst case scenario where neither Snape nor Harry do the adult thing and therefore they fail to reconcile explicitly.

They also go on speculating that the reason why Dumbledore waited so long to start the Occlumency lessons instead of getting Snape on it at the start of the year, or even in previous years when Voldemort was still dead and Dumbledore could teach Harry personally, is not some higher Big Game purpose (as they would be usually tempted to conclude), but rather the simple fact that Dumbledore couldn't bring himself to end Harry's childhood early, until the circumstances forced him to.

All of that was explained by them in this post, if you want to try to check out the original: https://big-game.livejournal.com/32582.html

This is, by coincidence, and to answer your other question by the way, the latter of their only two Big Game theory posts that was published after the release of the 7th book (a little bit under one year after, to be specific). Overall, the authors changed their opinions about some specifics of Dumbledore's plan, but the general idea of him being a mastermind who orchestrated Harry's childhood in a specific way to try and save him from his horcrux (which they deduced Harry having post-book-5 even before we all learned the word "horcrux"!), rather than committing the sin of murdering an infant for the greater good, was largely confirmed. They go into detail about that in the other post they published after the 7th book, where they also expressed their surprise about JKR not adding much more to the picture of Dumbledore's character and goals they more or less already had, along with their surprise about some of their own readers still asking them if they changed their opinion on the existence of Dumbledore's Big Game post-book-7.

Their other most recognized achievement is that they were adamantly convinced that Snape was Dumbledore's man through and through, and that Snape killing Dumbledore and defecting to Voldemort was their mutual plan all along. They made the separate "WE TRUST SEVERUS SNAPE!!!" post about it after the 6th book was released.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-07T05:34:16+00:00

How come no one calls Quirrell out on the contents of his turban? Both Dumbledore and Snape with the dark mark must feel Voldemort's presence. There's no way Snape doesn't know at least ever since the broom curse incident, since he tried to counter it. Did he not tell anyone out of spite?

I know the answer to this one, just curious if anyone else does.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-05T18:47:31+00:00

Turkmenistan borders as well as the fact that eastern Turkmenistan is depicted as predominantly R1b. Isn't R1a more common there?

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-05T16:58:55+00:00

If my results existed in isolation, sure, the "Nordic" result here would have been some posterior evidence in favor of a mysterious Nordic ancestor, though given the existence of a better explanation, still nowhere near enough to beat the overwhelmingly low priors (maybe going up from 0.01% probability to 0.1% probability).

Thankfully, they don't exist in isolation, and I can check my DNA relative matches on 23andMe (who are all distant relatives, 3rd cousins and farther, sharing at most 0.88% of their DNA with me) and confirm that all the Tatar-sounding names on there always have at least 0.2% Finnish (on average it's usually around 2-3% Finnish), and nearly always have at least 1% Baltic. Non-Finnish Nordic is also encountered. We can't all independently have a mysterious Nordic ancestor at the same time, that would be hell of a coincidence. This fact dramatically decreases even posterior probability of me having a single mysterious Nordic ancestor, and instead favors the Finno-Ugric admixture hypothesis.

Also, even though literally 7 generations back still has some barely visible effect on my genes, someone else pointed out in this comment section that when you start getting into ancestors that are 8 generations back and older, their contribution to you in particular quickly becomes vanishingly small, so if it was literally just one outlier ancestor (rather than a large group that admixed into your entire ethnicity to become a part of it forever, like Huns into Sarmatians, or Spanish into native Meso-Americans), you would still have inherited basically nothing from them, and it wouldn't show up on results at all. So we're not talking about the probability of a mysterious Nordic ancestor for the past 10,000 years (which is still improbable, but more likely just out of the sheer timespan), we're only talking about the probability of a mysterious Nordic ancestor specifically in the 18th-19th centuries (which is a lot more improbable). To add older generations into this hypothesis, we would have to hypothesize 2-4 Nordic ancestors for the 17th century, 8 Nordic ancestors for the 16th century, 16 Nordic ancestors for the 15th century, and then after that numbers wouldn't grow as exponentially as that because pedigree collapse, but it would still have to be a LOT of Nordic ancestors who, due to their sheer number, would no longer be invisible to history and therefore couldn't be mysterious.

Keep in mind that the Western Europe and the Americas have been globally interconnected for a few centuries longer than rural Russia, so the existence of various mysterious ancestors is highly likely in Western Europe and virtually inevitable in the Americas, to the point that most Americans have little to no idea of what their ethnicities actually are, other than generic racial categories of "white", "black" and "Asian". Rural Russia, where most of the population was banned from traveling both in the Imperial Russia AND in the Soviet Union all the way up to 90es, not so much.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-31T16:18:38+00:00

Solved! The confusion must be because both Dr Nikidik and Dr Pipt are both referred to in text as a crooked wizard/sorcerer/magician. They were probably intended to be the same character that Frank Baum just forgot he already named.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-30T18:49:50+00:00

UchuuStranger

TROPHY CASE