Law Commons^™

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 …

Enforcing Immigration Equity, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Congressional amendments to the immigration code in the 1990s significantly broadened grounds for removal while nearly eradicating opportunities for discretionary relief. The result has been a radical transformation of immigration law. In particular, the constriction of equitable discretion as an adjudicative tool has vested a new and critical responsibility in enforcement officials to implement rigid immigration rules in a normatively defensible way, primarily through the use of prosecutorial discretion. This Article contextualizes recent executive enforcement actions within this scheme and argues that the Obama Administration’s targeted use of limited enforcement resources and implementation of initiatives such as Deferred Action for …

Obama Fights To Continue Detention Of Migrant Families, Lauren Carasik

Media Presence

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Hassel On Qualified Immunity, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Stop Mass Deportation From The Dominican Republic To Haiti, Lauren Carasik

Media Presence

No abstract provided.

Trending@Rwu Law: Tom Peterson, 2l'S Post: An Alternative Spring Break "Post-Ex", Tom Peterson

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Perceptions Of Immigration In America, Manuel Cardoza

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Throughout history the United States as a nation saw many waves of immigrants who collectively shaped and helped build the America we see today. Today immigration has become a prevalent issue that is impeding progress and potentially facilitating the rise of new conflicts in a country plagued by civil injustices toward minority groups who are feeling marginalized and discriminated. Immigration desperately needs the attention of the U.S government in order to reach a solution and stop a community from being ostracized. Much of this great nation has been formed and built on the fundamental idea of immigrant forces coming together …

The Status Of Nonstatus, Geoffrey Heeren

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

26 States Sue Obama Over Immigration Plan, Lauren Carasik

Media Presence

No abstract provided.

Presidential Power And Enjoining The Obama Immigration Plan, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Jud Ms 06 Myer Marcus Interview Finding Aid, Katharine Renolds Thomas

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Myer M. Marcus was born in Portland, Maine in 1914, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants Saul Marcus, a Portland clothier, and his wife Bertha Marcus, nee Goldstein. As a boy he enjoyed spending his free time at the Portland Boys Club on Plum Street. He attended North School and Portland High School, then spent one year at the University of Virginia before transferring to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Marcus earned his LL.B. in 1937 from Boston University School of Law, then returned to Portland to open the Marcus and Marcus law office on Exchange Street with his younger …

Zealous Advocacy: Pushing Against The Borders In Immigration Litigation, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the forces that undermine zealous advocacy in the context of immigration court, and connects the context-specific issue of immigration defense to debates in the ethics literature about the possible justifications for zealous advocacy. As state bar rules and legal cultures and sub-cultures de-emphasize or remove the duty of zealousness, zealousness becomes increasingly counter-cultural. The article explores those trends, and shows (drawing on existing criminal defense ethical literature) why zealousness is justified in the adversarial and consequential immigration context. The article examines why a broadly understood and well-elaborated standard of zealous advocacy for immigration lawyers would be useful, …

Did Multicultural America Result From A Mistake? The 1965 Immigration Act And Evidence From Roll Call Votes, Gabriel J. Chin, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Between July 1964 and October 1965, Congress enacted the three most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965. As we approach the 50th anniversary of these laws, it is clear that all three have fundamentally remade the United States; education, employment, housing, politics, and the population itself have irreversibly changed.

Arguably the least celebrated yet most consequential of these laws was the 1965 Immigration Act, which set the United States on the path to become a "majority minority" nation. In …

A Jurisprudential Divide In U.S. V. Wong & U.S. V. June, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

In spring 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two consolidated cases construing the Federal Tort Claims Act, U.S. v. Kwai Fun Wong and U.S. v June, Conservator. The Court majority, 5-4, per Justice Kagan, ruled in favor of the claimants and against the Government in both cases. On the face of the majority opinions, Wong and June come off as straightforward matters of statutory construction. But under the surface, the cases gave the Court a chance to wrestle with fundamental questions of statutory interpretation. The divide in Wong and June concerns the role of the courts vis-à-vis Congress — one …

The History Of Prosecutorial Discretion In Immigration Law, Shoba S. Wadhia

Journal Articles

This Article describes the historical role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and connects this history to select executive actions announced by President Obama on November 20, 2014.

Demystifying Employment Authorization And Prosecutorial Discretion In Immigration Cases, Shoba S. Wadhia

Journal Articles

On November 20, 2014, President Barack Obama announced a series of immigration programs aimed to reform the immigration system. Deferred Action for Parents of Americans or Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and extended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) represent two such programs announced by the President. Both programs extend deferred action (one form of prosecutorial discretion) to qualifying individuals. Deferred action has been part of the immigration system for more than 50 years, and has been named explicitly by Congress, federal courts, and the agencies responsible for administering immigration laws. Additionally, regulations list deferred action as one basis for work …

Elusive Equality: Reflections On Justice Field’S Opinions In Chae Chan Ping And Fong Yue Ting, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

For immigration scholars, Justice Field is perhaps best remembered for his majority opinion in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Chinese exclusion, and credited for introducing the plenary power doctrine to immigration law. Yet, despite the opinion’s xenophobic rhetoric reflecting his personal views of the Chinese, Justice Field dissented in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, reasoning that, once they became lawful residents, the Chinese were entitled to be treated as equals under the law regardless of citizenship, a position supported by his earlier federal circuit court opinion in Ho Ah Kow v. …

The Prodigal Illegal: Christian Love And Immigration Reform, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

Despite the impasse around immigration reform, most everyone believes the United States’ immigration system is broken. And most agree that the key issue is what to do with the eleven million or so undocumented persons currently residing in the United States. As a Christian immigration law teacher, I have been interested in the debate among the churches as to what such reform should look like. In this Article, I use Professor Jeffrie Murphy’s conception of agapic love as a lens through which to examine reform proposals. I then evaluate the two positions Christian churches have seemed to embrace—permanent legal status …

Life After Limbo: Stateless Persons In The United States And The Role Of International Protection In Achieving A Legal Solution, David C. Baluarte

Scholarly Articles

Stateless persons are not recognized as citizens by any country, and as such, their enjoyment of fundamental human rights depends on the good faith of host countries, and their basic human security and dignity are often subject to the whims of immigration authorities. Despite this intense level of vulnerability, U.S. immigration law does not explicitly recognize statelessness, nor does it provide for humanitarian protection to relieve stateless persons of their suffering. Rather, stateless persons are treated like any other unauthorized migrants in the United States; when they are ordered removed, they are mandatorily detained while immigration officials undertake efforts to …

Immigration Actors: Federal Agencies And Courts, Enid Trucios-Haynes

Brandeis School of Law Faculty Scholarship

Understanding Immigration Law, Second Edition lays out the basics of U.S. immigration law in an accessible way to newcomers to the field. It offers background about the intellectual, historical, and constitutional foundations of U.S. immigration law. The book also identifies the factors that have historically fueled migration to the United States, including the economic "pull" of jobs and family in the United States and the "push" of economic hardship, political instability, and other facts of life in the sending country. In the middle chapters, the authors provide a capsule summary of the law concerning the admissions and removal procedures and …

Learning From Our Mistakes: Using Immigration Enforcement Errors To Guide Reform, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Immigration scholars and advocates frequently criticize our immigration system for imposing severe penalties akin to (or worse than) those in the criminal justice system — such as prolonged detention and permanent exile from the United States — without providing sufficient procedural protections to minimize enforcement errors. Yet there has been relatively little scholarship examining the frequency of errors in immigration enforcement and identifying recurring causes of those errors, in part because the data is hard to find. This Article begins by canvassing some of the publicly available data on enforcement errors, which reveal that such mistakes occur too frequently to …

Crimmigration Creep: Reframing Executive Action On Immigration, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In this Essay, I seek to build upon existing scholarship relating to DACA and DAPA, by offering an alternate lens through which to examine the programs. Specifically, I argue that DACA and DAPA, by naming and entrenching the “significant misdemeanor” bar to eligibility, contribute to a concerning expansion of “crimmigration law.” To be sure, neither program exists in codified law; nevertheless, the eligibility bars under DACA and DAPA are poised to wreak doctrinal havoc by upending the way particular criminal conduct is treated in the U.S. immigration system. In some respects, the DACA and DAPA bars are more stringent than …

Convergence: A Meeting Responds To Cries Of Desperation, David Bristol, Lee J. Teran, Gretchen Haynes

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Return Of The Jrad, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Ignacio Diaz Aguilar’s felony conviction for document forgery made him a priority for deportation and disqualified him from the possibility of discretionary relief from removal, despite apparently significant equities and mitigating factors. And yet, when Federal District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein sentenced Mr. Aguilar, he recommended that the government not deport him, even though no legal rules provided him with a route to that result. This essay places Judge Weinstein’s recommendation in a broader context, explaining its importance within the modern deportation regime. Statutory reforms and new agency practices have made criminal history the primary marker of noncitizen undesirability. …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Former Consular Officers In Support Of Respondent, Kerry V. Din, No. 13-1402 United States Supreme Court, Ira J. Kurzban, Edward F. Ramos, Jeffrey D. Kahn, Trina Realmuto

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This brief argues that certain visa application denials, particularly those based on information originating from agencies other than the Department of State, can be qualitatively different from denials based on consular discretion. Although the end result looks the same – “Visa Denied” – denials based on database and watchlist information maintained in the United States by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and other agencies, bear little resemblance to the traditional exercise of consular discretion because the specific information which requires the consular officer to deny these visas is usually not available for him or her to evaluate. Real …

America's Disposable Youth: Undocumented Delinquent Juveniles, Karla M. Mckanders

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Through discriminatory rhetoric state and local officials construct delinquent juvenile immigrant youth as the embodiment of a threat to public safety and American values. Accordingly, alleged delinquent undocumented immigrant children who have spent the majority of their lives in the United States, are subjected to discrimination and exclusionary practices, which enable lessened protections under the law. This article critically analyzes how undocumented delinquent youth, mainly Latino males, are constructed through the various narratives of immigrant children that are perpetuated by the media and policymakers, and how this impacts their treatment within the juvenile justice and immigration systems. Central to this …

Assumed Sane, Fatma Marouf

Scholarly Works

In 2014, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) held in Matter of G-G-S- that a noncitizen’s mental health status at the time of an offense is irrelevant to determining whether the offense is a “particularly serious crime” for immigration purposes. Since a “particularly serious crime” is a bar to asylum and withholding of removal, it can result in a noncitizen’s deportation to a country where he or she faces a serious risk of persecution. In deciding that immigration judges “are constrained by how mental health issues were addressed as part of the criminal proceedings,” the BIA failed to recognize the …

Believable Victims: Asylum Credibility And The Struggle For Objectivity, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

Asylum adjudication is often the invisible frontline in the struggle by oppressed groups to gain recognition for their plights. Through this process, individual people must tell their stories and try to show that they are genuine victims of persecution rather than simply illegal immigrants attempting to slip through the system. In 2002, because the world had not yet acknowledged the nature of the calamity from which they were escaping, many Darfurian asylum cases would have relied on the ability of each individual to convince government offices to believe their stories. They would have had to be deemed “credible,” or they …

Uncivil Obedience, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars and activists have long been interested in conscientious law-breaking as a means of dissent. The civil disobedient violates the law in a bid to highlight its illegitimacy and motivate reform. A less heralded form of social action, however, involves nearly the opposite approach. As a wide range of examples attest, dissenters may also seek to disrupt legal regimes through hyperbolic, literalistic, or otherwise unanticipated adherence to their formal rules.

This Article asks how to make sense of these more paradoxical protests, involving not explicit law-breaking but rather extreme law following. We seek to identify, elucidate, and call attention to …

Alternative Spring Break 2015 Report, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Association For Public Interest Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.