Aminata Diop switched lawyers after reading our Circulaire Valls explainer — and won

Aminata had been in Paris for seven years when she first retained a lawyer for her régularisation. She was working as a care-support worker in a residence for people with disabilities in the 19th arrondissement, had her two children in a French école élémentaire, and had been paying into the French social security system through a semi-formal employment arrangement for the last four of those years. Her lawyer had told her, confidently, that the Circulaire Valls — the 2012 administrative framework governing discretionary régularisation — did not apply to her situation.

She found our French régularisation page by searching for "Circulaire Valls admission exceptionnelle au séjour" one evening after her children were in bed. The page walks through the three main criteria under the Circulaire — length of presence, employment history, and family ties — and names, with specific citations to administrative circulars, the cases where each criterion is weighted most heavily. Aminata read it three times. The page explicitly addressed her case: five-plus years of presence, documented employment, children enrolled in the French school system. She was, in the plain language of the Circulaire, exactly the kind of applicant the admission exceptionnelle au séjour was meant to cover.

She fired her first lawyer the following week and found a new one through the association La Cimade, listed in our French consultants directory. The new lawyer — specialising in exactly this type of file — assembled a dossier in six weeks: proof of continuous residence, four employers’ attestations, her children’s school certificates, her social-security contribution history, and three letters of support from the residence where she worked. The préfecture in Paris issued her a convocation nine weeks later.

The admission exceptionnelle au séjour was granted. Aminata received her titre de séjour "vie privée et familiale" — one year, renewable — within a month of the préfecture decision. She has since renewed twice and is on track for a ten-year carte de résident. Her children, who have known no country but France, are now a French citizen and a dual Senegalese-French citizen through the regular acquisition procedures.

Aminata’s file is an uncomfortable one for us to tell because it means naming the fact that some lawyers charge for advice that is wrong. We will not name hers. We will say that the Circulaire Valls is a public document, that the admission exceptionnelle au séjour procedure is in the Code de l’entrée et du séjour des étrangers et du droit d’asile, and that an applicant with Aminata’s profile has every right to insist on it.