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Immigration Law Commons

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Criminal Law

American University Washington College of Law

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Immigration

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Full-Text Articles in Immigration Law

Criminalization And The Politics Of Migration In Brazil, Jayesh Rathod Jan 2018

Criminalization And The Politics Of Migration In Brazil, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In May 2017, the government of Brazil enacted a new immigration law, replacing a statute introduced in 1980 during the country’s military dictatorship with progressive legislation that advances human rights principles and adopts innovative approaches to migration management. One of the most notable features of the new law is its explicit rejection of the criminalization of migration, and its promotion of efforts to regularize undocumented migrants. Although the law itself is new, the values embedded in the law reflect recent trends in Brazilian immigration policy, which has embraced legalization, and has generally resisted the use of criminal law to punish …


Equity In Contemporary Immigration Enforcement: Defining Contributions And Countering Criminalization, Jayesh Rathod, Alia Al-Khatib Jan 2018

Equity In Contemporary Immigration Enforcement: Defining Contributions And Countering Criminalization, Jayesh Rathod, Alia Al-Khatib

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Since the 2016 Presidential election, discussions of immigration policy and enforcement have taken center stage in the public debate. In contrast to the Obama administration, which had articulated specific priorities for removal, the Trump administration has significantly expanded its enforcement targets. Indeed, high-level officials have confirmed that virtually anyone who is in the country without authorization is susceptible to removal. To make its case for enhanced immigration enforcement, the current administration has deployed familiar tropes regarding immigrant criminality and dangerousness. This rhetoric, operationalized through varied structures of criminalization, has shrunk the pool of individuals who can argue against removal, notwithstanding …


Learning From Our Mistakes: Using Immigration Enforcement Errors To Guide Reform, Amanda Frost Jan 2015

Learning From Our Mistakes: Using Immigration Enforcement Errors To Guide Reform, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Immigration scholars and advocates frequently criticize our immigration system for imposing severe penalties akin to (or worse than) those in the criminal justice system — such as prolonged detention and permanent exile from the United States — without providing sufficient procedural protections to minimize enforcement errors. Yet there has been relatively little scholarship examining the frequency of errors in immigration enforcement and identifying recurring causes of those errors, in part because the data is hard to find. This Article begins by canvassing some of the publicly available data on enforcement errors, which reveal that such mistakes occur too frequently to …


Crimmigration Creep: Reframing Executive Action On Immigration, Jayesh Rathod Jan 2015

Crimmigration Creep: Reframing Executive Action On Immigration, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In this Essay, I seek to build upon existing scholarship relating to DACA and DAPA, by offering an alternate lens through which to examine the programs. Specifically, I argue that DACA and DAPA, by naming and entrenching the “significant misdemeanor” bar to eligibility, contribute to a concerning expansion of “crimmigration law.” To be sure, neither program exists in codified law; nevertheless, the eligibility bars under DACA and DAPA are poised to wreak doctrinal havoc by upending the way particular criminal conduct is treated in the U.S. immigration system. In some respects, the DACA and DAPA bars are more stringent than …


Distilling Americans: The Legacy Of Prohibition On U.S. Immigration Law, Jayesh Rathod Jan 2014

Distilling Americans: The Legacy Of Prohibition On U.S. Immigration Law, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Since the early twentieth century, federal immigration law has targeted noncitizens believed to engage in excessive alcohol consumption by prohibiting their entry or limiting their ability to obtain citizenship and other benefits. The first specific mention of alcohol-related behavior appeared in the Immigration Act of 1917, which called for the exclusion of "persons with chronic alcoholism" seeking to enter the United States. Several decades later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 specified that any noncitizen who "is or was ... a habitual drunkard" was per se lacking in good moral character, and hence ineligible for naturalization. Although the "chronic …