At the Border- High School

• Entry with Inspection: Entering the United States through a designated, legal Port of Entry, where the individual presents valid travel documents to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer and is officially inspected, admitted, or paroled into the country.

• Entry without Inspection (EWI): The act of entering the United States avoiding detection, such as crossing a land border secretly between official checkpoints. EWI is a violation of federal law and severely limits an individual's future ability to adjust status domestically.

• Grounds of inadmissibility: The explicit statutory checklist under Section 212 of the INA that details why an individual can be legally barred from entering the United States or denied a green card. This includes health-related risks, criminal histories, or past immigration fraud.

• Crimes involving moral turpitude / Criminal background: A criminal background is an official record of an individual's arrests and convictions. A Crime Involving Moral Turpitude (CIMT) is a specific legal classification for offenses that violate gravity and social standards—such as fraud, larceny, or intent to cause serious bodily harm—which frequently render a non-citizen inadmissible or deportable.

• 3 or 10-year bars / Permanent bar: Punitive statutory bans triggered when an undocumented individual departs the United States after a period of unlawful presence. If they have between 180 days and one year of unlawful presence, they are barred from returning for 3 years; if they have more than one year, they face a 10-year bar. Certain repeat violations trigger a permanent bar.

• 212(d)(3) Waiver / Extreme hardship: A waiver is an official administrative pardon for an immigration violation. To qualify for a waiver of the 3- or 10-year bars, an applicant must demonstrate that their exclusion would result in "extreme hardship"—consequences far more severe than normal emotional distress—to their U.S. citizen or LPR relatives.