Immigration Law Commons^™

Cooperative Enforcement In Immigration Law, Amanda Frost

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

ABSTRACT: Immigration officials take two approaches to unauthorized immigrants: Either they seek to deport them, or they exercise prosecutorial discretion, allowing certain categories of unauthorized immigrants to remain in the United States without legal status. Neither method is working. The executive lacks the resources to remove more than a small percentage of the unauthorized population each year, and prosecutorial discretion is by definition an impermanent solution that leaves unauthorized immigrants vulnerable to exploitation at both work and home - harming not just them, but also the legal immigrants and U.S. citizens with whom they live and work.This Article: suggests a …

The Role And Impact Of Nationwide Injunctions: Written Testimony For The House Committee On The Judiciary, Subcommittee On The Courts, Intellectual Property, And The Internet, Amanda Frost

Legislative Testimony & Comments

This document is the written testimony submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. My testimony examines the authority of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions, defined as injunctions that bar the defendant from taking action against individuals who are not parties to the lawsuit. Such injunctions have been used frequently over the past few years to halt executive policies, particularly in immigration cases. My testimony explains that nationwide injunctions are sometimes essential to provide complete relief to the plaintiff, to avoid irreparable injury to those similarly …

Blog: Immigration Reform, Aishwarya Shesh

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Damaged Bodies, Damaged Lives: Immigrant Worker Injuries As Dignity Takings, Jayesh Rathod, Rachel Nadas

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Government data consistently affirm that foreign-born workers in the U.S. experience high rates of on-the-job illness and injury. This article explores whether—and under what circumstances—these occupational harms suffered by immigrant workers constitute a dignity taking. The article argues that some injuries suffered by foreign-born workers are indirect takings by the state due to the government’s lackluster oversight and limited penalties for violations of occupational safety and health laws. Using a framework of the body as property, the article then explores when work-related injury constitutes an infringement upon a property right. The article contends that the government’s weak enforcement apparatus, coupled …

Fundamentally Unfair: Databases, Deportation, And The Crimmigrant Gang Member, Katherine Conway

American University Law Review

Provocative language painting immigrants as dangerous criminals and promises of increased immigration enforcement were cornerstones of Donald j Trump's presidential candidacy. As president, he has maintained this rhetoric and made good on many of his promises by broadening the definition of "criminal conduct" for immigration enforcement purposes, touting a renewed focus on immigrant gangs and cartels, and conducting several nation-wide anti-gang sweeps that placed an estimated 1095 "known" gang members in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. But the Trump Administration did not create the specter of the criminal immigrant, or "crimmigrant," gang member, nor did it create the detection …

Building Bridges: Why Expanding Optional Practical Training Is A Valid Exercise Of Agency Authority And How It Helps F-1 Students Transition To H-1b Worker Status, Pia Nitzschke

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Perils And Possibilities Of Refugee Federalism, Burch Elias

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

As A Matter Of Fact, No: Appellate Jurisdiction To Review Denials Of Deferral Of Removal Under The Convention Against Torture, Sarah M. Vogt

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Amicus Brief In Jae Lee V. United States, Jenny M. Roberts

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

This amicus brief was filed on behalf of the Immigrant Defense Project, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild in support of the petitioner in Jae Lee v United States, No. 16-327. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mr. Lee, holding that Lee met his burden of showing that his attorney's erroneous advice about deportation prejudiced him. The Court found that it would not have been irrational for Lee to reject the plea he accepted and go to trial, despite the fact that he was "almost certain" to lose at trial. …

Brief For Amici Curiae Scholars Of Immigration Law In Support Of Plaintiffs-Appellees And Affirmance In Hawaii V. Trump, 2017 U.S. 9th Cir., Anita Sinha

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

No abstract provided.

Can We Act Globally While Thinking Locally? Responding To Stella Burch Elias, The Perils And Possibilities Of Refugee Federalism, Kit Johnson

American University Law Review

In The Perils and Possibilities of Refugee Federalism, Professor Stella Burch Elias skillfully exposes both the dangers and the opportunities presented by state responses to the resettlement of refugees within their borders. She concludes that states are prohibited from excluding refugees from their territory, but she argues that states have a previously untapped opportunity to legislate at the local level in an effort to promote the integration of refugees into their communities.

This Response does not challenge those conclusions. Rather, this Response seeks to provide context to the idea of refugee federalism by further discussing the problem, acknowledged by Professor …

Unconventional Refugees, Elizabeth Keyes

American University Law Review

Refugees are a flash point for political divisions in the United States and abroad. The enormous personal, moral, and legal challenges posed by the displacement of refugees around the world reveal the dire inadequacies of our current policies toward refugee protection. Children running to border agents at the U.S. southern border are treated as a security threat to be deterred, instead of a vulnerable population needing some level of protection. The numbers of people seeking safety in the United States, while not objectively high, places further strain on an already under-resourced and heavily burdened immigration system, which at the end …

Birthright Citizenship Under Attack: How Dominican Nationality Laws May Be The Future Of U.S. Exclusion, Ediberto Roman, Ernesto Sagas

American University Law Review

Attacks on birthright citizenship periodically emerge in the United States, particularly during presidential election cycles. Indeed, blaming immigrants for the country's woes is a common strategy for conservative politicians, and the campaign leading up to the 2016 presidential election was not an exception. Several of the Republican presidential candidates raised the issue, with President Donald Trump making it the hallmark of his immigration reform platform. Trump promised that, if elected, his administration would "end birthright citizenship."

In the Dominican Republic, ending birthright citizenship and curbing immigration are now enshrined into law, resulting from a significant constitutional redefinition of Dominican citizenship …

Australia's Guantanamo Bay: How Australian Migration Laws Violate The United Nations Convention Against Torture, Katelin Morales

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

No Due Process, No Asylum, And No Accountability: The Dissonance Between Refugee Due Process And International Obligations In The United States, Marissa Hill

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Independence And Immigration, Amanda Frost

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Arbitrary Detention? The Immigration Detention Bed Quota, Anita Sinha

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

When President Obama took office in 2009, Congress through appropriations linked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) funding to “maintaining” 33,400 immigration detention beds a day. This provision, what this Article refers to as the bed quota, remains in effect, except now the mandate is 34,000 beds a day. Since 2009, DHS detentions of non-citizens have gone up by nearly 25 percent. To accommodate for this significant spike over a relatively short period of time, the federal government has relied considerably on private prison corporations to build and operate immigration detention facilities.

This Article takes a comprehensive look at …

Danger And Dignity: Immigrant Day Laborers And Occupational Risk, Jayesh Rathod

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The plight of immigrant workers in the United States has captured significant scholarly attention in recent years. Despite the prevalence of discourses regarding this population, one set of issues has received relatively little attention: immigrant workers’ exposure to unhealthy and unsafe working conditions, and their corresponding susceptibility to workplace injuries and illnesses. Researchers have consistently found that immigrant workers suffer disproportionately from occupational injuries and fatalities, even when controlling for industry and occupation. Why, then, are foreign-born workers at greater risk for workplace injuries and fatalities, when compared with their native-born counterparts? This Article seeks to develop answers to that …

Collateral Consequences For Non-Citizen Defendants: When A Criminal Conviction Results In The Loss Of All That Makes Life Worth Living, Sara Elizabeth Dill

Criminal Law Practitioner

No abstract provided.

Disparate Treatment Of Mexican Unaccompanied Alien Children: The United States' Violation Of The Trafficking Protocol, Supplementing The Un Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, Alejandra Aramayo

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Concord With Which Other Families: Marriage Equality, Family Demographics, And Race, Nancy Polikoff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Exploited At The Intersection: A Critical Race Feminist Analysis Of Undocumented Latina Workers And The Role Of The Private Attorney General, Llezlie Green

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Undocumented Latina workers experience wage theft and other workplace exploitation at alarmingly high rates. The stock stories associated with immigrant workers often involve male day laborers or female domestic workers and fail to capture the experiences of women toiling in the farms, restaurants, factories, and home and business cleaning services that employ hundreds of thousands of immigrant women. The resulting invisibility of undocumented Latina women in the typical narratives parallels the paucity of undocumented Latina workers who make legal claims against their exploitative employers. Their distinct experiences are characterized by multiple intersecting vulnerabilities based upon their ethnicity, gender, and immigration …

Slavery By Another Name: 'Voluntary' Immigrant Detainee Labor And The Thirteenth Amendment, Anita Sinha

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

During the McCarthy era, Congress passed an obscure law authorizing detained immigrants to work for a payment of one dollar a day. The government justified the provision, which was modeled after the 1949 Geneva Convention’s protections for prisoners of war, in the context of the period’s relative heightened detentions of noncitizens. Soon afterwards, the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 diminished the use of detention drastically, and the practice of detainee labor lay dormant for decades. Modern changes to immigration law and its systems have rendered immigration detention today the largest mass incarceration movement in U.S. history. …

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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & 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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & 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 …

The History Of Prosecutorial Discretion In Immigration Law, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

D(E)Volving Discretion: Lessons From The Life And Times Of Secure Communities, Juliet P. Stumpf

American University Law Review

The devolution of immigration authority to line officers, touted as a strength of the Secure Communities program, planted the seeds of the program's downfall. Rising from the ashes of Secure Communities, the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) set priorities for removal and also unveiled a potential antidote to the devolution of agency discretion. This Article details the rise of Secure Communities and describes the devolution of discretion that ultimately undermined the program. It then spotlights a little-noticed attribute of the PEP-one that addresses head-on Secure Communities' devolution of enforcement discretion to the lowest level. PEP attempts to recapture ftderal discretion to …

Particularized Social Groups And Categorical Imperatives In Refugee Law: State Failures To Recognize Gender And The Legal Reception Of Gender Persecution Claims In Canada, The United Kingdom, And The United States, Melanie Randall

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Status Of Nonstatus, Geoggrey Heeren

American University Law Review

Millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States have no legal immigration status and live in constant fear of deportation. There are millions more who do have some sort of status, like lawful permanent residency, asylum, or a nonimmigrant visa. In between is the netherworld of nonstatus. Here live noncitizens who possess government documentation but few rights. They have no pathway to lawful permanent residence or citizenship and cannot receive most public benefits. If nonstatus is denied or revoked by a prosecutor or bureaucrat, there is no right to a hearing or an appeal. If the Executive Branch discriminates in …

The Boundaries Of Executive Discretion: Deferred Action, Unlawful Presence, And Immigration Law, Peter Margulies

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.