Immigration Law Commons^™

J.E.F.M. V. Lynch: The Jurisdictional Exclusion Of Legal Representation For Immigrant Children, Kourtney Speer

Golden Gate University Law Review

The border crisis created a perfect storm in immigration courts, as children wind their way from border crossings to immigration proceedings. The storm has battered immigration courtrooms crowded with young defendants but lacking lawyers and judges to handle the sheer volume of cases.

Local Human Rights Governance To Advance Migrants' Rights, Camilo Mantilla

Refugee Law & Migration Studies Brief

No abstract provided.

Imperialism In The Making Of U.S. Law, Nina Farnia

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article proceeds in two parts. In Part I, “U.S. Foreign Policy as Racial Policy,” I identify the four key policy pillars of U.S. imperialism: militarism, unilateral coercive measures, foreign aid, and the deployment of the dollar. I then pivot to a brief history of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, highlighting the geographic and racial specificities that influence the ideological and legal contours of U.S. imperialism. I end this section with an analysis of The Public Report of the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism (1985), which was a defining document in the making of anti-terrorism law …

On Account Of Youth: Winning Asylum For Children, Linda Kelly

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Embracing Crimmigration To Curtail Immigrant Detention, Pedro Gerson

UC Irvine Law Review

Immigration advocates have long objected to both the constitutionality and conditions of immigration detention. However, legal challenges to the practice have been largely unsuccessful due to immigration law’s “exceptionality.” Placing recent litigation carried out against immigration detention during the COVID-19 pandemic within the context of the judiciary’s approach to immigration, this Article argues that litigation is an extremely limited strategic avenue to curtail the use of immigration detention. I then argue that anti-immigration detention advocates should attempt to incorporate their agenda into criminal legal reform and decarceration efforts. This is important for both movements. Normatively, immigration detention raises comparable issues: …

Book Review Of Clamouring For Legal Protection: What The Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing From Persecution, Cori Alonso-Yoder

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Franco I Loved: Reconciling The Two Halves Of The Nation’S Only Government-Funded Public Defender Program For Immigrants, Amelia Wilson

Washington Law Review Online

Detained noncitizens experiencing serious intellectual and mental health disabilities are among the most vulnerable immigrant populations in the United States. The Executive Office for Immigration Review’s (EOIR) creation of the National Qualified Representative Program (NQRP) following a class action lawsuit was an important step in finally bringing meaningful protections to this population. The EOIR pledged to ensure government-paid counsel for those facing removal who had been adjudicated “incompetent” by an immigration judge, as well as other protections for those who had been identified as having a “serious mental disorder” but who had not yet been found incompetent. The NQRP is …

Immigration And Naturalization, Kevin J. Fandl, Betina Schlossberg, Stewart Chang Chang, Sabrina Damast, Anju Gupta, Pooja Mehta, Samantha Rumsey

The Year in Review

No abstract provided.

The Suspension Clause After Department Of Homeland Security V. Thuraissigiam, Jonathan Hafetz

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

In June 2020, in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, the Supreme Court of the United States rejected a constitutional challenge to Congress’s decision to eliminate habeas corpus jurisdiction over legal challenges to expedited removal orders by noncitizens in federal detention.

In Thuraissigiam, U.S. border patrol stopped the petitioner, Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, a Sri Lankan national of Tamil ethnicity, shortly after he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without inspection or an entry document. The petitioner asserted that he was fleeing persecution in his home country and sought asylum in the United States. The asylum officer concluded that Thuraissigiam had …

Heirs Of An Administration: Unlawful Executive Actions, Jerome Perez

Catholic University Law Review

The Supreme Court of the United States in DHS v. Regents on June 18, 2020, decided to stall the Trump administration from rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that the Obama administration created contrary to the Administrative Procedures Act (APA)––even though in 2016 the Supreme Court affirmed a preliminary injunction on the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) policy, which mirrors DACA. This blunder offhandedly sacrifices the Supreme Court’s reputation as nonpartisan by enlisting itself as the future arbiter of administrative issues with self-evident resolutions and deciding contrary to those resolutions to endorse a political agenda. …

Refoulement As Pandemic Policy, Haiyun Damon-Feng

Washington International Law Journal

COVID-19 restrictions on access to asylum likely violate non-refoulement obligations under international and federal law, and while they are extreme, they are not unique. There is a small but growing body of scholarly literature that rightly argues that such policies are pretextual covers used to enact restrictive immigration policy goals, but these arguments generally arise from an ahistorical perspective. This article positions restrictive COVID immigration policies in a broader historical context and argues that the United States has a long history of weaponizing fear of disease and contagion from migrants to justify restrictive immigration policies. The article offers a historical …

Strengthening Immigration Support For Agricultural Labor Migration And Ending Modern Day “Harvest Of Shame” A Comparative Study Of The American And Australian Approaches, Dr. Ying Chen

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Lineage Of Family Separation, Anita Sinha

Brooklyn Law Review

Family separation is a practice rooted in US history. In order to comprehensively examine the most recent execution of separating children from their parents under the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, we need to follow and understand this history. That is what this Article does. Examining the separation histories of enslaved, Indigenous, and immigrant families, it offers critical context of a reoccurring practice that has had devastating effects largely on communities of color, and across generations. By contextualizing the separation of migrant families crossing the US-Mexico border under zero tolerance, this Article identifies narratives that consistently rely on xenophobia and …

Understanding The Nansen Passport: A System Of Manipulation, Kacey Bengel

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The aftermath of World War I, the "war to end all wars," left the world with as many new problems as it did resolutions. State powers tested and expanded the boundaries and interpretations of international law; in the end, there were the triumphant Allied Powers, the heavily wounded Central Powers, and millions of displaced individuals left adrift in the wake. Never before had the international community attempted to address the issue of refugees, and the product of the postwar efforts did not provide a complete solution. This paper will analyze the international community's] response to the massive refugee crisis and …

Jus Sanguinis Or Just Plain Discrimination? Rejecting A Biological Requirement For Birthright Citizenship Of Children Born Abroad To Same-Sex Couples Via Assisted Reproductive Technology, Thomas Evans

Georgia Law Review

Until recently, the State Department had a policy deeming children born abroad to married same-sex couples to be children born out of wedlock. Then, applying the statute for children born out of wedlock with more rigorous requirements, the State Department only allowed citizenship to pass through a biological relationship between the biological parent and the child.

Although the State Department updated this policy in May 2021 to allow for birthright citizenship of children born abroad to married same-sex couples, the new policy does not go far enough. This Note argues that Congress should amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to …

Immigration Detention And Dissent: The Role Of The First Amendment On The Road To Abolition, Alina Das

Georgia Law Review

The movement to abolish slavery relied heavily on the exercise and protection of enslaved and formerly enslaved people’s freedom of speech against robust efforts to suppress their messaging. The same is true in the context of the movement to abolish immigration detention. For decades, people in immigration detention, formerly detained people, and their allies have exercised their First Amendment rights to expose the conditions of their confinement and demand their freedom. In response to their protests and other forms of individual and collective expression, detained and formerly detained immigrants have faced suppression and retaliation, threatening not only their right to …

Executive Discretion And First Amendment Constraints On The Deportation State, Jennifer Lee Koh

Georgia Law Review

Given the federal courts’ reluctance to provide clarity on the degree to which the First Amendment safeguards the free speech and association rights of immigrants, the immigration policy agenda of the President now appears to determine whether noncitizens engaging in speech, activism, and advocacy are protected from retaliation by federal immigration authorities. This Essay examines two themes: first, the discretion exercised by the Executive Branch in the immigration context; and second, the courts’ ambivalence when it comes to enforcing immigrants’ rights to be free from retaliation. To do so, this Essay explores the Supreme Court’s influential 1999 decision in Reno …

Centering Noncitizens' Free Speech, Gregory P. Margarian

Georgia Law Review

First Amendment law pays little attention to noncitizens’ free speech interests. Perhaps noncitizens simply enjoy the same First Amendment rights as citizens. However, ambivalent and sometimes hostile Supreme Court precedents create serious cause for concern. This Essay advocates moving noncitizens’ free speech from the far periphery to the center of First Amendment law. Professor Magarian posits that noncitizens epitomize a condition of speech inequality, in which social conditions and legal doctrines combine to create distinctive, unwarranted barriers to full participation in public discourse. First Amendment law can ameliorate speech inequality by promoting an ethos of free speech obligation, amplifying the …

Hernández V. Mesa: A Case For A More Meaningful Partnership With The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, Peyton Jacobsen

Seattle University Law Review

Through an in-depth examination of Hernández, the Inter-American Human Rights System, and the success of Mexico’s partnership with said system, this Note will make a case for embracing human rights bodies— specifically, the Inter-American System on Human Rights—as an appropriate and necessary check on the structures that form the United States government. Part I will look closely at the reasoning and judicially created doctrine that guided the decision in Hernández, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the complicated path through the courts that led to a seemingly straightforward yet unsatisfying result. Part II will illustrate the scope …

Citizenship Federalism, Emily R. Chertoff

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

A First Amendment Law For Migrant Emancipation, Daniel Morales

Georgia Law Review

The First Amendment promises to change our world, but like any legal doctrine, its radical potential is stymied by the status quo bias of the legal system that administers it. For migrants, I urge here, this guarantor of free speech and expression does even less than it does for other subordinated groups. The formal and informal disabilities that migrants face in the public square—like the omnipresent threat of deportation—make existing First Amendment doctrine a weak and unreliable ally in the fight for migrants’ rights. It is possible to imagine another, emancipatory First Amendment law that might better facilitate the alteration …

Regulatory Constitutional Law: Protecting Immigrant Free Speech Without Relying On The First Amendment, Michael Kagan

Georgia Law Review

The Supreme Court has long deprived immigrants of the full protection of substantive constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, leaving undocumented immigrants exposed to detention and deportation if they earn the government’s ire through political speech. The best remedy for this would be for the Supreme Court to reconsider its approach. This Essay offers an interim alternative borrowed from an analogous problem that arises under the Fourth Amendment. Under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has indicated that illegally obtained evidence may be suppressed in a removal proceeding only if the Fourth Amendment violation was “egregious.” Yet, some circuit …

Fear Foreigners, And Free Expression: A Brief Reflection On Ideological Exclusion And Deportation In The United States, Julia Rose Kraut

Georgia Law Review

“Why should we be afraid of this man and his ideas?” asked Secretary of State William P. Rogers, referring to Belgian, Marxist economist Ernest Mandel.1 In 1969, Mandel applied for a nonimmigrant visa to visit the United States after receiving invitations to speak at several American colleges and universities, including Amherst College, Columbia University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the New School for Social Research.2 Mandel had received visas to visit the United States twice before: one in 1962 and another in 1968.3 Yet, this time, Mandel’s application for a visa was denied.4

The State Department informed Mandel …

Undocuamerica Monologues, Motus Theater, Alejandro Fuentes Mena, Armando Peniche, Christian Solano-Córdova, Kirsten Wilson

University of Colorado Law Review

The following work contains three monologues from Motus Theater's UndocuAmerica Project, which aims to interrupt dehumanizing portrayals of immigrants by encouraging thoughtful engagement on the challenges faced by undocumented communities and the assets immigrants bring to our country. The monologues were created in a collaboration between leaders with DACA status and Motus Theater Artistic Director Kirsten Wilson during a seventeen-week autobiographical- monologue workshop. All three pieces were presented in a virtual performance on April 8, 2021, as an introduction to the 29th Annual Rothgerber Conference.

Decitizenizing Asian Pacific American Women, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Margaret Hu

University of Colorado Law Review

The Page Act of 1875 excluded Asian women immigrants from entering the United States, presuming they were prostitutes. This presumption was tragically replicated in the 2021 Atlanta Massacre of six Asian and Asian American women, reinforcing the same harmful prejudices. This Article seeks to illuminate how the Atlanta Massacre is symbolic of larger forms of discrimination, including the harms of decitizenship. These harms include limited access to full citizenship rights due to legal barriers, restricted cultural and political power, and a lack of belonging. The Article concludes that these harms result from the structure of past and present immigration laws …

Pursuing Citizenship During Covid-19, Ming Hsu Chen

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.