Law Commons^™

Modalities Of Social Change Lawyering, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith

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The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise, and #MeToo pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises, including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology …

Due Process Deportations, Angelica Chazaro

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Should pro-immigrant advocates pursue federally funded counsel for all immigrants facing deportation? For most pro-immigrant advocates and scholars, the answer is self-evident: More lawyers for immigrants would mean more justice for immigrants, and thus, the federal government should fund such lawyers. Moreover, the argument goes, federally funded counsel for immigrants would improve due process and fairness, as well as make immigration enforcement more efficient. This Article argues the opposite: Federally funded counsel is the wrong goal. The majority of expulsions of immigrants now happen outside immigration courts— and thus are impervious to immigration lawyering. Even for those who make it …

The End Of Deportation, Angélica Cházaro

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This Article introduces to legal scholarship a new horizon for pro-immigrant scholarship and advocacy: deportation abolition. The ever-present threat of deportation shapes the daily lives of noncitizens. Instead of aiming for a pathway to citizenship, most noncitizens must now contend with dodging the many pathways to banishment. Despite growing threats to immigrant survival, most pro-immigrant scholarship and advocacy that aims to reduce migrant suffering assumes deportation as inevitable. The focus remains on improving individual outcomes by aligning the process of deportation with due process and the rule of law. But considered from the point of view of those facing deportation, …

An Innovative Approach To Movement Lawyering: An Immigrant Rights Case Study, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith

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The role of lawyers in social change movements is more important than ever as communities mobilize around systemic racism, police killings, xenophobia, rising unemployment, and widening economic inequality. The immigrant rights movement is a critical part of these efforts to foment change. This Article leverages an in-depth case study – the rise and fall of the controversial immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities - to explore how lawyers work as part of a community to challenge power and effectuate change. The dismantling of Secure Communities was widely credited to a relentless campaign to thwart the government’s then-expanding deportation strategy. …

Challenging The "Criminal Alien" Paradigm, Angélica Cházaro

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Deportation of so-called “criminal aliens” has become the driving force in U.S. immigration enforcement. The Immigration Accountability Executive Actions of late 2014 provide the most recent example of this trend. Even for immigrants’ rights advocates, conventional wisdom holds that if deportations must occur, “criminal aliens” should be the first to go. A voluminous “crimmigration” scholarship notes the ever-growing entwinement of criminal and immigration enforcement, but does not challenge this fundamental premise.

This Article calls for a rejection of the formulation of the “criminal alien”—the figure used to increasingly justify the preservation and expansion of a harmful immigration regime. It thus …

Beyond Respectability: Dismantling The Harms Of "Illegality", Angélica Cházaro

Articles

Current pro-immigrant reform efforts focus on legalization. Proposals seek to place as many of the eleven million undocumented people in the United States as possible on a “path to earned citizenship.” However, these reform efforts suffer from a significant and underappreciated blind spot: the strategies used to advocate legalization harm those to whom the path to citizenship is barred—such as those with prior deportation orders, prior criminal convictions, and those who have yet to arrive. The problem begins with rhetoric: in making the push for legalization, immigrant rights groups have deployed imagery of the undocumented as law-abiding, hard-working, and family-oriented—the …

What Dna Can And Cannot Say: Perspectives Of Immigrant Families About The Use Of Genetic Testing In Immigration, Llilida P. Barata, Helene Starks, Patricia Kuszler, Wylie Burke

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Genetic technologies are being implemented in areas that extend beyond the field of medicine to address social and legal problems. An emerging example is the implementation of genetic testing in the family petitioning process in immigration policy. This use of genetic testing offers the potential benefits of reducing immigration fraud and making the process more efficient and accessible for immigrants, especially those without documentation. However, little is known about the positive or negative impacts of such testing on immigrant families and their communities.

This study collected empirical data through family interviews to understand the experiences and attitudes of individuals who …

The Promise And Peril Of The Anti-Commandeering Rule In The Homeland Security Era: Immigrant Sanctuary As An Illustrative Case, Trevor George Gardner

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This brief narrative captures the second wave of “immigrant sanctuary”—a term used to describe the state and local government practice of restricting police departments from participation in immigration enforcement. The immigrant sanctuaries of the Homeland Security era are of unique significance given the ongoing dialogue among legal scholars regarding the significance of local law enforcement participation in national and domestic security administration after 2001, as well as the legal framework structuring cooperative security governance.

Despite the broad powers wielded by the federal government in security administration, the Supreme Court’s holding in Printz v. United States serves as a substantial check …

Hands Off Our Fingerprints: State, Local, Andindividual Defiance Of Federal Immigrationenforcement, Christine N. Cimini

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Secure Communities, though little-known outside law-enforcement circles, is one of the most powerful of the federal government’s immigration enforcement programs. Under Secure Communities, fingerprints collected by state and local law enforcement and provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for criminal background checks are automatically shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which checks the fingerprints against its immigration database. In the event of a match, an immigration detainer can be issued and an individual held after they would otherwise be entitled to release. Originally designed as a voluntary program in which local governments could choose to participate, the Department …

Rebellious State Crimmigration Enforcement And The Foreign Affairs Power, Mary Fan

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The propriety of a new breed of state laws interfering in immigration enforcement is pending before the Supreme Court and the lower courts. These laws typically incorporate federal standards related to the criminalization of immigration ("crimmigration'), but diverge aggressively from federal enforcement policy. Enacting states argue that the legislation is merely a species of "cooperative federalism" that does not trespass upon the federal power over foreign affairs, foreign commerce, and nationality rules since the laws mirror federal standards. This Article challenges the formalist mirror theory assumptions behind the new laws and argues that inconsistent state crimmigration enforcement policy and resulting …

Undocumented Workers And Concepts Of Fault: Are Courts Engaged In Legitimate Decisionmaking, Christine N. Cimini

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This Article examines judicial decisionmaking in labor and employment cases involving undocumented workers. Labor and employment laws, designed to protect all workers regardless of immigration status, often conflict with immigration laws designed to deter the employment of undocumented workers. In the absence of clarity as to how these differing policy priorities should interact, courts are left to resolve the conflict. While existing case law appears to lack coherence, this Article identifies a uniform judicial reliance upon “fault-based” factors. This Article offers a structure to understand this developing body of law and evaluates the legitimacy of the fault-based decisionmaking modalities utilized …

Rolling Back The Tide: Challenging The Criminalization Of Immigrants In Washington State, Angélica Cházaro

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No abstract provided.

Post-Racial Proxies: Resurgent State And Local Anti-"Alien" Laws And Unity-Rebuilding Frames For Antidiscrimination Values, Mary D. Fan

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Though unauthorized migration into the United States has diminished substantially since 2007, anti-“illegal alien” state and local laws and furor are flaring again. While one of the biggest worries regarding such “anti-alien” laws is the risk of racialized harm, courts invalidating overreaching statutes are relying on structural or procedural grounds, such as preemption and due process doctrines. [PARA] This Article examines how these political and legal trends point to how proxies are used in a post-racial era to dance around race, in constructive, national unity-rebuilding as well as divisive, inflammatory ways. Anti-alien legislation is a proxy way to vent resurgent …

When Deterrence And Death Mitigation Fall Short: Fantasy And Fetishes As Gap-Fillers In Border Regulation, Mary D. Fan

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Drawing on fieldwork and political theory with Lacanian psychoanalytic influences, this article analyzes how fantasy and fetishes help sustain strategies shown to be no solution to U.S. border control problems. More than a decade after the official launch of the border control paradigm of "prevention through deterrence," predicated on the assumption that ramping up walls, barriers, policing, and the human costs of border crossing would deter, there has been scant evidence of deterrence and much evidence of diversion of migrants to more dangerous crossing points where death rates have soared. Attempts to mitigate the cost to life have also proved …

Ask, Don’T Tell: Ethical Issues Surrounding Undocumented Workers’ Status In Employment Litigation, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

The presence of an estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, of which an estimated 7.2 million are working, has become a flashpoint in the emerging national debate about immigration. Given these statistics, it is not surprising that many undocumented workers suffer injuries in the workplace that are typically legally cognizable. Even though undocumented workers are entitled to a number of legal remedies related to their employment, seeking legal relief often raises heightened concerns about the disclosure of their status. This article explores lawyers' increasingly complex ethical obligations with regard to a client's immigration status in the context …

The Immigration-Terrorism Illusory Correlation And Heuristic Mistake, Mary De Ming Fan

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The national broil over immigration reform is fermenting an illusory correlation and mistaken heuristic. Two events illustrate the involvement of legislators in the manufacture and mplification of this heuristic mistake. A controversial bill passed by the House of Representatives in December 2005 explicitly and extensively packaged immigration control with antiterrorism.' During his term as a congressman, J. D. Hayworth published a book claiming that inflows of people over the U.S.-Mexico border pose a "terrorist threat," that the nation has witnessed an "illegal alien crime spree," and that high immigration rates from Mexico threaten social instability.[para] Such pronouncements by legislators generate …

Japan’S ‘Foreign Workers’ Policy: A View From The United States, Daniel H. Foote

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No abstract provided.

The United States Policy On Hiv Infected Aliens: Is Exclusion An Effective Solution, Christine N. Cimini

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As of the summer of 1991, though the World Health Organization (WHO) had only 366,455 documented cases of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the organization estimated that as many as 1.25 million people worldwide had actually contracted AIDS. That number was predicted to grow to twenty-five to thirty million cases of HIV worldwide by the year 2000. With hysteria and misinformation surrounding the transmission HIV/AIDS, Congress made changes to existing immigration laws to exclude entry to individuals with HIV. This comment critiques the early 1990s United States immigration policy that added HIV to the list of diseases for which a …