Law Commons^™

Challenging The "Criminal Alien" Paradigm, Angélica Cházaro

Articles

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 …