Law Commons^™

Windsor Beyond Marriage: Due Process, Equality & Undocumented Immigration, Anthony O'Rourke

Anthony O'Rourke

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Windsor, invalidating part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, presents a significant interpretive challenge. Early commentators have criticized the majority opinion’s lack of analytical rigor, and expressed doubt that Windsor can serve as a meaningful precedent with respect to constitutional questions outside the area of same-sex marriage. This short Article offers a more rehabilitative reading of Windsor, and shows how the decision can be used to analyze a significant constitutional question concerning the use of state criminal procedure to regulate immigration.

From Windsor’s holding, the Article distills …

Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Immigration Enforcement's Failed Experiment With Penal Severity, Teresa A. Miller

Teresa A. Miller

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 …

Zone Of Nondeference: Chevron And Deportation For A Crime

Rebecca Sharpless

Policing Sex, Policing Immigrants: What Crimmigration's Past Can Tell Us About Its Present And Its Future, Rachel E. Rosenbloom

Rachel E. Rosenbloom

The flow of information from local police to federal immigration officials forms a central element of the contemporary phenomenon known as “crimmigration” — the convergence of immigration enforcement and criminal law enforcement. This Essay provides the first historical account of the early roots of this information flow and a new perspective on its contemporary significance. Previous scholarship locates crimmigration’s origins in the 1980s and ’90s. Drawing on extensive archival research on day-to-day interactions between local police and federal immigration officials, this Essay explores a lost chapter in the development of crimmigration: the pipeline that brought men arrested by vice squads …

Laborers Or Criminals? The Impact Of Crimmigration On Labor Standards Enforcement, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] As we examine the criminalization of immigration, commonly referred to as “crimmigration” (Stumpf, 2006), it is essential to consider its impact on other areas of law and policy that involve immigrants but are not traditionally thought of as formal elements of either criminal law or immigration law. Why? As Hortensia’s story illustrates, crimmigration may unexpectedly affect protections and rights that relate to immigrants’ experiences but come from other areas of law and policy. This chapter explores the impact of crimmigration on labor standards enforcement. By labor standards enforcement, the chapter refers mainly to the wage and hour, health and …

"Immigrants Are Not Criminals": Respectability, Immigration Reform, And Hyperincarceration, Rebecca Sharpless

Rebecca Sharpless

Mandatory Immigration Detention For U.S. Crimes: The Noncitizen Presumption Of Dangerousness, Mark Noferi

Mark L Noferi

The Punishment/El Castigo: Undocumented Latinos And U.S. Immigration Processing, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

A Meditation On Moncrieffe: On Marijuana, Misdemeanants, And Migration, Victor C. Romero

Victor C. Romero

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 …

Clear And Simple Deportation Rules For Crimes: Why We Need Them And Why It's Hard To Get Them, Rebecca Sharpless

Rebecca Sharpless

The Legitimacy Of Crimmigration Law, Juliet P. Stumpf

Juliet P Stumpf

Crimmigration law—the intersection of immigration and criminal law—with its emphasis on immigration enforcement, has been hailed as the lynchpin for successful political compromise on immigration reform. Yet crimmigration law’s unprecedented approach to interior immigration and criminal law enforcement threatens to undermine public belief in the fairness of immigration law. This Article uses pioneering social science research to explore people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of crimmigration law. According to Tom Tyler and other compliance scholars, perceptions about procedural justice—whether people perceive authorities as acting fairly—are often more important than a favorable outcome such as winning the case or avoiding arrest. Legal …