Law Commons^™

Immigration Law's Missing Presumption, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

The presumption of innocence is a foundational concept in criminal law but is completely missing from quasi-criminal immigration proceedings. This Article explores the relevance of a presumption of innocence to removal proceedings, arguing that immigration law has been designed and interpreted in ways that disrupt formulating any such presumption to facilitate deportation. The Article examines the meaning of “innocence” in the immigration context, revealing how historically racialized perceptions of guilt eroded the notion of innocence early on and connecting the missing presumption to persistent associations between people of color and guilt. By analyzing how a presumption of innocence is impeded …

Regional Immigration Enforcement, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

Regional disparities in immigration enforcement have existed for decades, yet they remain largely overlooked in immigration law scholarship. This Article theorizes that bottom-up pressure from states and localities, combined with top-down pressures and policies established by the President, produce these regional disparities. The Article then provides an empirical analysis demonstrating enormous variations in how Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s twenty-four field offices engage in federal enforcement around the United States. By analyzing data related to detainers, arrests, removals, and detention across these field offices, the Article demonstrates substantial differences between field offices located in sanctuary and anti-sanctuary regions, as well as …

Subfederal Immigration Regulation And The Trump Effect, Huyen Pham, Pham Hoang Van

Faculty Scholarship

The restrictive changes made by the Trump presidency on U.S. immigration policy have been widely reported: the significant increases in both interior and border enforcement, the travel ban prohibiting immigration from majority-Muslim countries, and the termination of the DACA program. Beyond the traditional levers of federal immigration control, this administration has also moved aggressively to harness the enforcement power of local and state police to increase interior immigration enforcement. To that end, the administration has employed both voluntary measures (like signing 287(g) agreements deputizing local police to enforce immigration laws) and involuntary measures (threatening to defund jurisdictions with so-called “sanctuary” …

Invoking Federal Common Law Defenses In Immigration Cases, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that we should take a deeper look at the applicability of federal common law defenses in immigration cases. In the rare cases where noncitizens attempt to raise common law defenses, such arguments tend to be dismissed offhand by immigration judges simply because removal proceedings are technically civil, not criminal. Yet many common-law defenses may be raised in civil cases. Additionally, immigration proceedings have become increasingly intertwined with the criminal system. After examining how judges already rely on federal common law to fill in gaps in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), this Article proposes three categories of …

Free Trade, Immigrant Workers, And Employment Discrimination, Angela D. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

This article reframes the outward-looking perspective on workers’ rights provisions in free trade agreements. It argues that those provisions provide an opportunity to reinforce the workplace rights of noncitizen workers in the United States. Scholars and worker advocates have criticized recent free trade agreements for their lack of enforcement mechanisms and protections for workers in developing countries. They argue that this has encouraged a race to the bottom on the part of multi-national corporations who relocate to developing countries to take advantage of cheap labor costs, thereby costing U.S. workers’ jobs.

This article shifts the focus. Instead, it argues that …

Invisible Adjudication In The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Michael Kagan, Rebecca Gill, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

Non-precedent decisions are the norm in federal appellate courts, and are seen by judges as a practical necessity given the size of their dockets. Yet the system has always been plagued by doubts. If only some decisions are designated to be precedents, questions arise about whether courts might be acting arbitrarily in other cases. Such doubts have been overcome in part because nominally unpublished decisions are available through standard legal research databases. This creates the appearance of transparency, mitigating concerns that courts may be acting arbitrarily. But what if this appearance is an illusion? This Article reports empirical data drawn …

The Network For Justice: Pursuing A Latinx Civil Rights Agenda, Luz E. Herrera, Pilar M. Hernández-Escontrías

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the need to develop a Latinx-focused network that advances law and policy. The Network for Justice is necessary to build upon the existing infrastructure in the legal sector to support the rapidly changing demographic profile of the United States. Latinxs are no longer a small or regionally concentrated population and cannot be discounted as a foreign population. Latinxs reside in every state in our nation and, in some communities, comprise a majority of the population. The goal of the Network for Justice is to facilitate and support local and statewide efforts to connect community advocates to formal …

Alternatives To Immigration Detention, Fatma E. Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

The United States places over 440,000 people each year in immigration detention, far more than any other country in the world. This Article argues that there are compelling humanitarian and financial reasons to utilize more alternatives to detention. It examines the strengths and limitations of existing alternatives, including the need to develop more community-based case management programs and to rely less on electronic monitoring. The Article then sets forth several legal arguments under the Constitution, Rehabilitation Act, and international human rights law for requiring greater consideration of alternatives to detention.

A Particularly Serious Exception To The Categorical Approach, Fatma E. Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

A noncitizen who has been convicted of a “particularly serious crime” can be deported to a country where there is a greater than fifty percent chance of persecution or death. Yet, the Board of Immigration Appeals has not provided a clear test for determining what is a “particularly serious crime.” The current test, which combines an examination of the elements with a fact-specific inquiry, has led to arbitrary and unpredictable decisions about what types of offenses are “particularly serious.” This Article argues that the categorical approach for analyzing convictions should be applied to the particularly serious crime determination to promote …

Executive Estoppel, Equitable Enforcement, And Exploited Immigrant Workers, Angela D. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Unauthorized workers in abusive workplaces have found themselves in a tug-of-war between federal agencies. On one side are federal prosecutors with the Department of Justice or Immigration and Customs Enforcement--who seek to criminally prosecute or deport the workers and treat the workers as defendants. On the other side are agencies like the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who have determined the workers are victims of workplace exploitation and deserve protection. This mixed message—protection from one federal agency and prosecution by another—is contrary to Congressional intent and undermines the enforcement of …

Whole Other Story: Applying Narrative Mediation To The Immigration Beat, Carol Pauli

Faculty Scholarship

If Donald Trump, kicking off his campaign for the White House, was saying “what everyone is thinking,” about illegal immigration, it must be that his message mirrored a narrative that already existed in the minds of his audience. That fearful story of criminals invading the U.S. borders has long been a dominant theme in the mainstream news immigration story. Like all news stories, this one focuses attention on some facts at the expense of others. Like many news stories, it draws its power from earlier, well-known tales — some as old as the Flood. This article recommends that the news …

Alienage Classifications And The Denial Of Health Care To Dreamers, Fatma E. Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

In the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), passed in 2010, Congress provided that only “lawfully present” individuals could obtain insurance through the Marketplaces established under the Act. Congress left it to the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) to define who is “lawfully present.” Initially, HHS included all individuals with deferred action status, which is an authorized period of stay but not a legal status. After President Obama announced a new policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) in June 2012, however, HHS amended its regulation specifically to exclude DACA recipients from the definition of “lawfully present.” The revised …

State-Created Immigration Climates And Domestic Migration, Huyen Pham, Pham Hoang Van

Faculty Scholarship

With comprehensive immigration reform dead for the foreseeable future, immigration laws enacted at the subfederal level -- cities, counties, and states -- have become even more important. Arizona has dominated media coverage and become the popular representation of the states' response to immigration by enacting SB 1070 and other notoriously anti-immigrant laws. Illinois, by contrast, has received relatively little media coverage for enacting laws that benefit the immigrants within its jurisdiction. The reality on the ground is that subfederal jurisdictions in the United States have taken very divergent paths on the issue of immigration regulation.

Compiling city, county, and state …