Law Commons^™

Taking The "Fam" Out Of Family: Adjudicating The State Department's Discriminatory Treatment Of Same-Sex Parents On The Merits, Camrin M. Rivera

Maine Law Review

Cisgender same-sex male married couples, unlike cisgender opposite-sex married couples, will always require artificial reproductive technology (ART) for at least one of the spouses to attain biological parenthood. Due to legal and financial barriers to ART, many of these couples turn to international ART services to grow their families. In doing so, these families may face immigration battles when they apply for recognition of their child’s United States citizenship. For example, a prior State Department policy sparked three lawsuits after the State Department refused to recognize children as United States citizens from birth because the children were not biologically related …

Duress In Immigration Law, Elizabeth A. Keyes

Seattle University Law Review

The doctrine of duress is common to other bodies of law, but the application of the duress doctrine is both unclear and highly unstable in immigration law. Outside of immigration law, a person who commits a criminal act out of well-placed fear of terrible consequences is different than a person who willingly commits a crime, but American immigration law does not recognize this difference. The lack of clarity leads to certain absurd results and demands reimagining, redefinition, and an unequivocal statement of the significance of duress in ascertaining culpability. While there are inevitably some difficult lines to be drawn in …

The School To Deportation Pipeline, Laila L. Hlass

Georgia State University Law Review

The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes.

Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in …