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Full-Text Articles in Law
A Meditation On Moncrieffe: On Marijuana, Misdemeanants, And Migration, Victor C. Romero
A Meditation On Moncrieffe: On Marijuana, Misdemeanants, And Migration, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
This essay is a brief meditation on the immigration schizophrenia in our law and legal culture through the lens of the Supreme Court’s latest statement on immigration and crime, Moncrieffe v. Holder. While hailed as a “common sense” decision, Moncrieffe is a rather narrow ruling that does little to change the law regarding aggravated felonies or the ways in which class and citizenship play into the enforcement of minor drug crimes and their deportation consequences. Despite broad agreement on the Court, the Moncrieffe opinion still leaves the discretion to deport minor state drug offenders in the hands of the federal …
Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Immigration Enforcement's Failed Experiment With Penal Severity, Teresa A. Miller
Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Immigration Enforcement's Failed Experiment With Penal Severity, Teresa A. Miller
Journal Articles
This article traces the evolution of “get tough” sentencing and corrections policies that were touted as the solution to a criminal justice system widely viewed as “broken” in the mid-1970s. It draws parallels to the adoption some twenty years later of harsh, punitive policies in the immigration enforcement system to address perceptions that it is similarly “broken,” policies that have embraced the theories, objectives and tools of criminal punishment, and caused the two systems to converge. In discussing the myriad of harms that have resulted from the convergence of these two systems, and the criminal justice system’s recent shift away …
Decriminalizing Border Crossings, Victor C. Romero
Decriminalizing Border Crossings, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
An international border crosser should only be deemed a criminal if the United States government can prove that, with requisite criminal intent, she engaged in an act aside from crossing the border that would constitute a crime. No longer should crossing the border be a strict liability criminal offense. Doing so will restore balance to the civil immigration system, conserve scarce enforcement resources to target truly criminal behavior, enhance our standing abroad, and help heal our racially-polarized discourse on immigration policy.
A New Look At Neo-Liberal Economic Policies And The Criminalization Of Undocumented Migration, Teresa A. Miller
A New Look At Neo-Liberal Economic Policies And The Criminalization Of Undocumented Migration, Teresa A. Miller
Journal Articles
This paper situates the current “crisis” surrounding the arrival and continued presence of undocumented immigrants in the United States within penological trends that have taken root in American law over the past thirty years. It positions the shift from more benevolent to the increasingly harsh legal treatment of undocumented immigrants as the continuation of a succession of legal reforms criminalizing immigrants, and governing immigration through crime. By charting the increasing salience of crime in public perceptions of undocumented immigrants, and comparing the immediately preceding criminal stigmatization of so-called “criminal aliens”, this paper exposes current severity toward undocumented immigrants as consistent …
Blurring The Boundaries Between Immigration And Crime Control After Sept. 11th, Teresa A. Miller
Blurring The Boundaries Between Immigration And Crime Control After Sept. 11th, Teresa A. Miller
Journal Articles
Although the escalating criminalization of immigration law has been examined at length, the social control dimension of this phenomenon has gone relatively understudied. This Article attempts to remedy this deficiency by tracing the relationship between criminal punishment and immigration law, demonstrating that the War on Terror has further blurred these distinctions and exposing the social control function that pervades immigration law enforcement after September 11th prioritized counterterrorism. In doing so, the author draws upon the work of Daniel Kanstroom, Michael Welch, Jonathan Simon and Malcolm Feeley.
Race, Immigration, And The Department Of Homeland Security, Victor C. Romero
Race, Immigration, And The Department Of Homeland Security, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
Despite the wisdom of separating the service and enforcement functions of our immigration bureau, the new tripartite system under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security risks fueling the "immigrant Arab as terrorist" stereotype, rather than helping to re-establish the reality that noncitizen terrorists, like U.S. citizen ones, are a rare species.
Decoupling 'Terrorist' From 'Immigrant': An Enhanced Role For The Federal Courts Post 9/11, Victor C. Romero
Decoupling 'Terrorist' From 'Immigrant': An Enhanced Role For The Federal Courts Post 9/11, Victor C. Romero
Journal Articles
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft has utilized the broad immigration power ceded to him by Congress to ferret out terrorists among noncitizens detained for minor immigration violations. Such a strategy provides the government two options: deport those who are not terrorists, and then prosecute others who are. While certainly efficient, using immigration courts and their less formal due process protections afforded noncitizens should trigger greater oversight and vigilance by the federal courts for at least four reasons: First, while the legitimate goal of immigration law enforcement is deportation, Ashcroft's true objective in targeting …
Citizenship And Severity: Recent Immigration Reforms And The New Penology, Teresa A. Miller
Citizenship And Severity: Recent Immigration Reforms And The New Penology, Teresa A. Miller
Journal Articles
Over the past twenty years, scholars of criminal law, criminology and criminal punishment have documented a transformation in the practices, objectives, and institutional arrangements underlying a range of criminal justice system functions that are at the heart of penal modernism. In contrast to the preceding eighty years of criminal justice practices that were progressively more modern in their belief in the rationality of the criminal offender and their concern for enhancing civilization through rehabilitative responses to criminality, these scholars note that since the mid-198''0s the relatively settled assumptions about the framework that shaped criminal justice and penal practices for nearly …