Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 20 of 20

Full-Text Articles in Law

Challenging The Criminalization Of Undocumented Drivers Through A Health-Justice Framework, Jason A. Cade Jan 2024

Challenging The Criminalization Of Undocumented Drivers Through A Health-Justice Framework, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

States increasingly use driver’s license laws to further policy objectives unrelated to road safety. This symposium contribution employs a health justice lens to focus on one manifestation of this trend—state schemes that prohibit noncitizen residents from accessing driver’s licenses and then impose criminal sanctions for driving without authorization. Status-based no-license laws not only facilitate legally questionable enforcement of local immigration priorities but also impose structural inequities with long-term health consequences for immigrants and their family members, including US citizen children. Safe, reliable transportation is a significant social determinant of health for individuals, families, and communities. Applying a health justice lens …


The Immigration Implications Of Presidential Pot Pardons, Jason A. Cade Jan 2023

The Immigration Implications Of Presidential Pot Pardons, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

This Essay examines the immigration implications of President Joe Biden’s Proclamation on October 6, 2022, pardoning most federal and D.C. offenders who committed the offense of simple marijuana possession. A late twentieth century interpretive shift by the Board of Immigration Appeals holds that pardons only prevent deportation for certain criminal history categories, which do not include controlled substance offenses, and thus far lower federal courts have deferred to the agency’s approach.Nevertheless, according to the analysis I offer, President Biden’s cannabis pardons should be deemed fully effective to eliminate all immigration penalties. All of the immigrant pardon cases to reach the …


'Water Is Life!' (And Speech!): Death, Dissent, And Democracy In The Borderlands, Jason A. Cade Jan 2020

'Water Is Life!' (And Speech!): Death, Dissent, And Democracy In The Borderlands, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Decades of stringent immigration enforcement along the Southwest border have pushed migrants into perilous desert corridors. Thousands have died in border regions, out of the general public view, yet migrants continue to attempt the dangerous crossings. In response to what they see as a growing humanitarian crisis, activists from organizations such as No More Deaths seek to expand migrant access to water, to honor the human remains of those who did not survive the journey, and to influence public opinion about border enforcement policies. Government officials, however, have employed a range of tactics to repress this border-policy “dissent,” including blacklists, …


All The Border's A Stage: Humanitarian Aid As Expressive Dissent, Jason A. Cade Jan 2020

All The Border's A Stage: Humanitarian Aid As Expressive Dissent, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Immigration enforcement along the Southwest border between the United States and Mexico has long channeled immigrants into perilous desert corridors, where many thousands have dies, out of the public view. In response to this humanitarian crisis, activists from organizations such as No More Deaths (NMD) trek deep into the treacherous desert, hoping to save lives, honor the remains of those who did not survive, and influence public opinion about border enforcement policies. NMD's activism is not merely utilitarian but also deeply expressive; ultimately, they hope to convey the message that all lives -- including those of unauthorized migrants-- are worth …


Restoring The Statutory Safety-Valve For Immigrant Crime Victims: Premium Processing For Interim U Visa Benefits, Jason A. Cade, Mary Honeychurch Jan 2019

Restoring The Statutory Safety-Valve For Immigrant Crime Victims: Premium Processing For Interim U Visa Benefits, Jason A. Cade, Mary Honeychurch

Scholarly Works

This essay focuses on the U visa, a critical government program that has thus far failed to live up to its significant potential. Congress enacted the U visa to aid undocumented victims of serious crime and incentivize them to assist law enforcement without fear of deportation. The reality, however, is that noncitizens eligible for U status still languish in limbo for many years while remaining vulnerable to deportation and workplace exploitation. This is in large part due to the fact that the agency has never devoted sufficient resources to processing these cases. As a result, the potential benefits of the …


Teaching Tomorrow’S Lawyers Through A (Semi-) Generalist, (Mostly-) Individual Client Poverty Law Clinic: Reflections On Five Years Of The Community Health Law Partnership, Jason A. Cade Jan 2019

Teaching Tomorrow’S Lawyers Through A (Semi-) Generalist, (Mostly-) Individual Client Poverty Law Clinic: Reflections On Five Years Of The Community Health Law Partnership, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Design options when starting a live-client clinic from scratch can be somewhat overwhelming. Should the clinic focus on systemic impact or individual representation? Appellate work or hearings? Should the clinic specialize or cover multiple legal issues? Another set of issues concerns how the clinic should find and accept its clients, and whether students should have a role in the intake process. The list of choices goes on. In this Essay, written for the Georgia Law Review’s Online Issue celebrating 50 years of clinics at the University of Georgia School of Law, I describe how I have navigated these and other …


Judicial Review Of Disproportionate (Or Retaliatory) Deportation, Jason A. Cade Jan 2018

Judicial Review Of Disproportionate (Or Retaliatory) Deportation, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

This Article focuses attention on two recent and notable federal court opinions considering challenges to Trump administration deportation decisions. While finding no statutory bar to the noncitizens’ detention and deportation in these cases, the court in each instance paused to highlight the injustice of the removal decisions. This Article places the opinions in the context of emerging immigration enforcement trends, which reflect a growing indifference to disproportionate treatment as well as enforcement actions founded on retaliation for the exercise of constitutional rights. Judicial decisions like the ones considered here serve vital functions in the cause of immigration law reform even …


Sanctuaries As Equitable Delegation In An Era Of Mass Immigration Enforcement, Jason A. Cade Jan 2018

Sanctuaries As Equitable Delegation In An Era Of Mass Immigration Enforcement, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Opponents of—and sometimes advocates for—sanctuary policies describe them as obstructions to the operation of federal immigration law. This premise is flawed. On the better view, the sanctuary movement comports with, rather than fights against, dominant new themes in federal immigration law. A key theme—emerging both in judicial doctrine and on-the-ground practice—focuses on maintaining legitimacy by fostering adherence to equitable norms in enforcement decision-making processes. Against this backdrop, the sanctuary efforts of cities, churches, and campuses are best seen as measures necessary to inject normative (and sometimes legal) accuracy into real-world immigration enforcement decision-making. Sanctuaries can erect front-line equitable screens, promote …


Proportionality Lost? The Rise Of Enforcement-Based Equity In The Deportation System And Its Limitations, Jason A. Cade Jan 2017

Proportionality Lost? The Rise Of Enforcement-Based Equity In The Deportation System And Its Limitations, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

This article briefly explains and critiques the legal framework that has made enforcement discretion the primary means of injecting proportionality and fairness into the modern deportation system. The article provides an overview of shifting approaches to this enforcement discretion under the Obama and Trump administrations, and describes some of the key Supreme Court jurisprudence interpreting this framework.


Judging Immigration Equity: Deportation And Proportionality In The Supreme Court, Jason A. Cade Jan 2017

Judging Immigration Equity: Deportation And Proportionality In The Supreme Court, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Though it has not directly said so, the United States Supreme Court cares about proportionality in the deportation system. Or at least it thinks someone in the system should be considering the justifiability of removal decisions. As this Article demonstrates, the Court’s jurisprudence across a range of substantive and procedural challenges over the last fifteen years increases or preserves structural opportunities for equitable balancing at multiple levels in the deportation process. Notably, the Court has endorsed decision makers’ consideration of the normative justifiability of deportation even where noncitizens have a criminal history or lack a formal path to lawful status. …


Enforcing Immigration Equity, Jason A. Cade Nov 2015

Enforcing Immigration Equity, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Congressional amendments to the immigration code in the 1990s significantly broadened grounds for removal while nearly eradicating opportunities for discretionary relief. The result has been a radical transformation of immigration law. In particular, the constriction of equitable discretion as an adjudicative tool has vested a new and critical responsibility in enforcement officials to implement rigid immigration rules in a normatively defensible way, primarily through the use of prosecutorial discretion. This Article contextualizes recent executive enforcement actions within this scheme and argues that the Obama Administration’s targeted use of limited enforcement resources and implementation of initiatives such as Deferred Action for …


Return Of The Jrad, Jason A. Cade Jan 2015

Return Of The Jrad, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Ignacio Diaz Aguilar’s felony conviction for document forgery made him a priority for deportation and disqualified him from the possibility of discretionary relief from removal, despite apparently significant equities and mitigating factors. And yet, when Federal District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein sentenced Mr. Aguilar, he recommended that the government not deport him, even though no legal rules provided him with a route to that result. This essay places Judge Weinstein’s recommendation in a broader context, explaining its importance within the modern deportation regime. Statutory reforms and new agency practices have made criminal history the primary marker of noncitizen undesirability. …


The Challenge Of Seeing Justice Done In Removal Proceedings, Jason A. Cade Nov 2014

The Challenge Of Seeing Justice Done In Removal Proceedings, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Prosecutorial discretion is a critical part of the administration of immigration law. This Article considers the work and responsibilities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) trial attorneys, who thus far have not attracted significant scholarly attention, despite playing a large role in the ground-level implementation of immigration law and policy. The Article makes three main contributions. First, I consider whether ICE attorneys have a duty to help ensure that the removal system achieves justice, rather than indiscriminately seek removal in every case and by any means necessary. As I demonstrate, trial attorneys have concrete obligations derived from statutory provisions, …


The Challenge Of Seeing Justice Done In Removal Proceedings, Jason A. Cade Nov 2014

The Challenge Of Seeing Justice Done In Removal Proceedings, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Prosecutorial discretion is a critical part of the administration of immigration law. This Article considers the work and responsibilities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) trial attorneys, who thus far have not attracted significant scholarly attention, despite playing a large role in the ground-level implementation of immigration law and policy. The Article makes three main contributions. First, I consider whether ICE attorneys have a duty to help ensure that the removal system achieves justice, rather than indiscriminately seek removal in every case and by any means necessary. As I demonstrate, trial attorneys have concrete obligations derived from statutory provisions, …


The Challenge Of Seeing Justice Done In Removal Proceedings, Jason A. Cade Oct 2014

The Challenge Of Seeing Justice Done In Removal Proceedings, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Prosecutorial discretion is a critical part of the administration of immigration law. This Article considers the work and responsibilities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) trial attorneys, who thus far have not attracted significant scholarly attention, despite playing a large role in the ground-level implementation of immigration law and policy. The Article makes three main contributions. First, I consider whether ICE attorneys have a duty to help ensure that the removal system achieves justice, rather than indiscriminately seek removal in every case and by any means necessary. As I demonstrate, trial attorneys have concrete obligations derived from statutory provisions, …


Policing The Immigration Police: Ice Prosecutorial Discretion And The Fourth Amendment, Jason A. Cade Nov 2013

Policing The Immigration Police: Ice Prosecutorial Discretion And The Fourth Amendment, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

A persistent puzzle in immigration law is how the removal adjudication system should respond to the increasing prevalence of violations of noncitizens’ constitutional rights by arresting officers. Scholarship in this area has focused on judicial suppression of unconstitutionally obtained evidence, typically by arguing that the Supreme Court should overrule its 1984 decision in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza not to enforce the exclusionary rule in civil immigration court. This Essay, in contrast, considers the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorneys in upholding the Fourth Amendment, taking as a launching point the recent exercise of prosecutorial discretion by ICE attorneys in …


The Plea Bargain Crisis For Noncitizens In Misdemeanor Court, Jason A. Cade Jun 2013

The Plea Bargain Crisis For Noncitizens In Misdemeanor Court, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

This Article considers three factors contributing to a plea-bargain crisis for noncitizens charged with misdemeanors: 1) the expansion of deportation laws to include very minor offenses with little opportunity for discretionary relief from removal; 2) the integration of federal immigration enforcement programs with the criminal justice system; and 3) the institutional norms in non-federal lower criminal courts, where little attention is paid to evidence or individual equities and where bail and other process costs generally outweigh perceived incentives to fight charges. The Article contends that these factors increase the likelihood that a noncitizen’s low-level conviction will not reliably indicate guilt …


Deporting The Pardoned, Jason A. Cade Dec 2012

Deporting The Pardoned, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Federal immigration laws make noncitizens deportable on the basis of state criminal convictions. Historically, Congress implemented this scheme in ways that respected the states’ sovereignty over their criminal laws. As more recent federal laws have been interpreted, however, a state’s decision to pardon, expunge, or otherwise set-aside a conviction under state law will often have no effect on the federal government’s determination to use that conviction as a basis for deportation. While scholars have shown significant interest in state and local laws regulating immigrants, few have considered the federalism implications of federal rules that ignore a state’s authority to determine …


The Land Of The Free: Human Rights Violations At Immigration Detention Facilities In America, Caitlin J. Mitchel Jan 2007

The Land Of The Free: Human Rights Violations At Immigration Detention Facilities In America, Caitlin J. Mitchel

LLM Theses and Essays

In America today, aliens who commit even minor visa violations can be detained in one of many immigration detention facilities throughout the U.S. These detainees may be transferred to a facility far away from their homes, families, and attorneys. While imprisoned in these detention facilities, some detainees are treated as and housed with criminals. Their substantive and procedural rights are limited and their human rights are violated. The U.S. laws that should protect them are the very laws that strip them of their rights to court proceedings, challenges of decisions regarding detention, and judicial review. By issuing substantial reservations, declarations, …


Can International Law Provide Extra-Constitutional Protection For Excludable Aliens?, Louis B. Sohn Dec 1991

Can International Law Provide Extra-Constitutional Protection For Excludable Aliens?, Louis B. Sohn

Scholarly Works

This paper focuses on the problems of those who do not qualify for a regular admission as refugees, but are detained at the entrance point, or are detained in the United States after being released on temporary parole or pending repatriation. The thesis I shall try to defend is that these persons must be treated according to basic rules of humanitarian law; that they are entitled to be treated as human beings, regardless of any particular legislation or administrative regulations depriving them of basic legal protection granted to citizens and regular residents of the country.