The tool surface
Every shelf in the library, exposed as tools.
When your AI connects to BIA Edge over MCP, it gains a research toolkit purpose-built for immigration law: thirty-plus tools spanning case law, validity, unpublished decisions, statutes, crimmigration screening, agency guidance, and current awareness. Below is the core surface; your connector always reports the live list, and specialist lanes expand it on demand.
Case law
BIA, Attorney General, AAO, circuit, district, and Supreme Court decisions.
Full-corpus case search — names, citations, concepts, natural language — ranked case-first with authority metadata on every result.
Exact lookup by citation, with binding-level and citation-use guidance.
How later authorities have treated a case — followed, distinguished, limited.
ImmCite status: good law, caution, negative, or overruled — with the directing authority quoted. How ImmCite works →
Unpublished decisions
The shelf no other database has: hundreds of thousands of unpublished BIA and AAO rulings.
Search the full unpublished corpus by issue, posture, outcome, or date.
Filter to decisions tagged respondent- or petitioner-favorable — the wins you can pattern your motion on.
Statutes & regulations
The INA, Title 8, the CFR, and the Constitution, cross-linked to the cases that construe them.
Provision search across statutes and regulations.
Exact lookup that understands INA, U.S.C., and CFR citation variants.
Crimmigration
State criminal codes ingested from official sources, ready for categorical-approach work.
Find the statute of conviction by citation or text, with full provision text and source provenance.
Pull a specific provision with its code path and currency note.
Agency guidance & reference
USCIS Policy Manual, FAM, practice manuals, country reports, and the working documents of the agencies.
Search the reference library across thirty-plus official sources.
Exact reference-section lookup; find_in_reference scans within a source.
The current USCIS position on a benefits question, with source-text confidence labels.
Forms, fees, eligibility, and procedure for a benefit type, assembled from official sources.
Current awareness
What changed — so your agent never argues from a stale record.
Priority-date availability, current and historical.
Live coverage and freshness metadata for every source in the corpus.
Research orchestration
Intake and routing for agents running multi-step research.
Matter intake: jurisdiction inference, source routing, and an unpublished-decision search plan.
A bounded source bundle for a discrete question — statute text, governing cases, validity checks.
Opens specialist lanes on demand: district courts, doctrine graph, pinpoint passages, visa, USCIS, and country conditions.
Specialist lanes
Beyond the core surface, activate_toolset exposes deeper instruments when a question calls for them: the reviewed doctrine graph (search_doctrines, expand_precedent_context), pinpoint passage retrieval with stable evidence IDs (search_passages, get_passages), organized federal district court decision families, country-conditions search, and EOIR statistics. Tool names and counts evolve with the corpus — the connector always reports the live surface.