Law Commons^™

Revisiting Immigration Exceptionalism In Administrative Law, Christopher J. Walker

Reviews

With all the changes swirling in administrative law, one trend seems to be getting less attention than perhaps it should: the death of regulatory exceptionalism in administrative law. For decades, many regulatory fields—such as tax, intellectual property, and antitrust—viewed themselves as exceptional, such that the normal rules of the road in administrative law do not apply. The Supreme Court and the lower courts have increasingly rejected such exceptionalism in many regulatory contexts, emphasizing that the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and related administrative law doctrines are the default rules unless Congress has clearly chosen to depart from them by statute in …

Bringing "Civil"Ity Into Immigration Law: Using The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure To Fix Immigration Adjudication, Richard Frankel -- Professor Of Law

Vanderbilt Law Review

Government lawyers frequently argue, and courts have frequently held, that noncitizens in removal proceedings do not have the same rights as defendants in criminal proceedings. A common argument made to support this position is that removal proceedings are civil matters. Accordingly, a noncitizen facing deportation has fewer due process protections than a criminal defendant, and deportation proceedings similarly provide fewer protections than criminal proceedings.

In many ways, however, the rules governing immigration proceedings differ markedly from those governing civil actions in court. Immigration proceedings suffer from arcane and hypertechnical procedures that impede immigrants from having their claims reviewed on the …

Unaccompanied Children And The Need For Legal Representation In Immigration Proceedings, Sejal Singh

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

An unaccompanied child is defined as someone who enters the United States under the age of eighteen, without lawful status, and without an accompanying parent or legal guardian. Despite the term’s implication, many children do not enter the country alone but are either separated from their family members at the border or left by smugglers or other migrants near the border. The number of unaccompanied minors plunged in early 2020 due to border closures and restrictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic; however, a recent surge has led to a strain on government resources and a backlog of cases in immigration …

Nefarious Notarios: Responding To Immigration Scams As White Collar Crime As A Matter Of Public Policy, Sarah Cossman

Refugee Law & Migration Studies Brief

Immigration scams targeting non-citizens can have devastating impacts on an individual's status and ability to remain in the United States legally. The phenomenon of notario fraud occurs when an individual misrepresents themself as a notario publico in an effort to defraud immigrants seeking legal services. In Spanish-speaking countries, a notario publico is a highly trained legal professional, akin to an attorney, who provides legal advice and drafts legal documents. The term is a false cognate. The English equivalent, a notary, is an individual with narrow witnessing duties and much less discretion. Problems arise when individuals obtain a notary public license …

Anti-Corruption’S Next Great Migration?: Strengthening U.S. Refugee And Asylum Law Under Existing U.S. Anti-Corruption Commitments, Bianka Ukleja

Refugee Law & Migration Studies Brief

First, this paper will describe the U.S.’s anticorruption commitments under international law. Next, it will present the general features of current U.S. refugee and asylum law, pertaining to particular social group (PSG) and political opinion claims. Last, this paper will discuss how the Biden Anti-Corruption Memo provides fertile ground for DHS to initiate an informal rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to engage civil society on how U.S. refugee and asylum laws can better support a pathway to citizenship for anti-corruption activists in pursuit of key U.S. foreign policy interests abroad and who find themselves unable to seek …

Freedom In The Balance: Procedural Due Process Rights And The Burden Of Proof In Detention Hearings In Immigration Removal Proceedings, Colin Brady

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Part I of this Note considers the statutory and regulatory basis for immigration detention. Part II reviews prior cases decided by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) that bear on the question. Part III discusses how the Supreme Court has addressed previous procedural due process concerns within the immigration system and how lower courts have reacted. Part IV lays out how the Supreme Court has conceptualized the constitutional due process rights extended to noncitizens and how that has changed over the years. Part V considers how other categories of individuals are treated with respect to involuntary detention and the burden …

No Soy De Aquí, Ni Soy De Allá: U.S. Citizen Children Are Paying The Price For Our Nation's Broken Immigration System (Comment), Daisy J. Ramirez

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Current immigration polices continue to force mixed-status family separation and do not provide any attainable avenues for immigration relief. Modern immigration law is complex, filled with statutes and regulations that create waste, delay, and confusion among immigrants, their families, and the United States judicial system. As a result, U.S. citizen children are bearing the costs of a faulty immigration system.

Legal Order At The Border, Evan J. Criddle

Faculty Publications

For generations, the United States has grappled with high levels of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border. This Article offers a novel theoretical framework to explain why legal order remains elusive at the border. Drawing inspiration from Lon Fuller’s “interactional view of law,” I argue that immigration law cannot attract compliance unless it is general, public, prospective, clear, consistent, and stable; obedience with its rules is feasible; and the law’s enforcement is congruent with the rules as enacted. The flagrant violation of any one of these principles could frustrate the development of a functional legal order. Remarkably, U.S. immigration law …

Immigration Detention Abolition And The Violence Of Digital Cages, Sarah R. Sherman-Stokes

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has a long history of devastating immigration enforcement and surveillance. Today, in addition to more than 34,000 people held in immigration detention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) surveils an astounding 296,000 people under its “Alternatives to Detention” program. The number of people subjected to this surveillance has grown dramatically in the last two decades, from just 1,339 in 2005. ICE’s rapidly expanding Alternatives to Detention program is marked by “digital cages,” consisting of GPS-outfitted ankle shackles and invasive phone and location tracking. Government officials and some immigrant advocates have categorized these digital cages as a humane “reform”; …

Why Cost/Benefit Balancing Tests Don't Exist: How To Dispel A Delusion That Delays Justice For Immigrants, Joshua J. Schroeder

West Virginia Law Review

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court nullified its earlier presumption that indefinite immigrant detention without bond hearings is unconstitutional under Zadvydas v. Davis. If Zadvydas is a nullity, those who raise due process balancing tests during the post-removal-period in immigrant habeas review may need to find new grounds for review. However, since Boumediene v. Bush was decided in 2008, there are several reasons not to despair Zadvydas’s demise

.

For one, Zadvydas spoke to an extremely narrow subset of cases. It granted a concession under the Due Process Clause to immigrants detained beyond the statutory 90-day removal period. It …

Expanding The Sixth Amendment’S Right To Counsel To Ensure Fairness For Noncitizen Defendants, Kathy Santamaria Mendez

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Anti-Carceral Theory And Immigration: A View From Two Law School Clinics, Sabrina Balgamwalla, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

This article explores clinical teaching philosophies related to anti-carceral theory and provides examples of how to support student learning in clinics serving immigrant clients. Anti-carceral theory in this context is used to refer to an approach that resists criminalization and incarceration within law, drawing on abolitionism, intersectional and anti-carceral feminism, and decolonization.

The anti-carceral lens provides framing and language to name the dynamics of social exclusion and discrimination inherent in immigration law. It also allows us to unpack immigration regulation as a series of choices made within the larger context of law enforcement and its systems of surveillance, policing, and …

The Absurdity Of Criminalizing Encouraging Words, Eric Franklin Amarante

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the Supreme Court’s holding in Hansen v. U.S., which upheld a statute that makes it a felony to encourage an undocumented person to remain in the United States.

Immigration Enforcement Preemption, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Publications

The Supreme Court's 2012 decision, Arizona v. United States, turned back the most robust and brazen state regulation of immigration in recent memory, striking down several provisions of Arizona's omnibus enforcement law. Notably, the Court did not limit preemption inquiries to conflicts between the state law and congressional statutes. The Court also based its decision on the tension between the state law and Executive Branch enforcement policies. The landmark decision seemed to have settled the Court's approach to immigration enforcement federalism. Yet, a scant eight years after Arizona, in Kansas v. Garcia, the Court upheld Kansas's prosecutions of noncitizens who …

Fleeing The Land Of The Free, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay is the first scholarly intervention, from any discipline, to examine the number and nature of asylum claims made by U.S. citizens, and to explore the broader implications of this phenomenon. While the United States continues to be a preeminent destination for persons seeking humanitarian protection, U.S. citizens have fled the country in significant numbers, filing approximately 14,000 asylum claims since 2000. By formally seeking refuge elsewhere, these applicants have calculated that the risks of remaining in the United States outweigh the bundle of rights that accompany U.S. citizenship. Given the United States’ recent flirtation with authoritarianism, and the …

The End Of Asylum Redux And The Role Of Law School Clinics, Elora Mukherjee

Faculty Scholarship

The Biden Administration has perpetuated many of the prior administration’s hostile policies undermining access to asylum at the southern border. This Essay first examines these policies and then identifies emerging opportunities for law school clinics to address these new challenges, including by serving asylum seekers south of the U.S.-Mexico border.