Immigration Law Commons^™

Presidential Power And Enjoining The Obama Immigration Plan, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Removing The Distraction Of Delay, Jill E. Family

Catholic University Law Review

Immigration adjudication is in an awkward position. There is an intricate system to adjudicate immigration removal (deportation) cases, but that system is hindered by restrictions, and the constant threat of further restrictions, that reflect distaste for providing process to foreign nationals facing removal. There is a push and pull phenomenon, with immigration adjudication stretched uncomfortably in between two forces. On the one side, there is a push to apply common notions of due process to immigration removal cases, to push that the same concepts of procedural justice should apply in immigration cases as they would in any other context. On …

The Impact Of Third Preference Status (Professionals) On Immigrants As Created By The 1965 Amendment To The Immigration And Nationality Act - Retraction Of Expansion Of Degree Equivalency - Matter Of Portugues Do Atlantico Information Bureau, Inc., Debra A. Egger

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Immigration - Due Process - The Availability Of Constitutional Safeguards To Detained Cuban Aliens, Garcia-Mir V. Meese, 788 F.2d 1446 (11th Cir. 1986), Cert. Denied, 107 S. Ct. 289 (1986)., Elizabeth G. Marlowe

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Removability, Jennifer Lee Koh

Florida Law Review

Removability, in the context of immigration law, refers to the government’s legal authority to seek deportation for violations of the federal immigration statute. Removability matters now more than ever before, both for individuals facing possible deportation as well as for the many governmental institutions charged with assessing removability. Using four areas of emerging law—claims to U.S. citizenship, the categorical approach to determining the immigration consequences of crime, the application of the exclusionary rule in removal proceedings, and the exercise of administrative discretion—this Article places removability at the center of its analysis and presents a framework for better understanding removability. Under …

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 …

Constructing Crimmigration: Latino Subordination In A “Post-Racial” World, Yolanda Vazquez

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Over the last forty years, the concern over the relationship between noncitizens and criminality has reached epic proportions. Laws, policies, procedures, and rules have been developed, the immigration and criminal justice system have been employed, and billions of dollars have been spent towards detecting, detaining, prosecuting, and removing those who are targeted as posing “the greatest threat to the nation.” As a result, a “new” phenomenon emerged, crimmigration, that not only redesigned the criminal and immigration systems, but also brought about a cultural transformation in the United State —restructuring social categories, diminishing economic and political power, and perpetuating the marginalization …

An Administrative Stopgap For Migrants From The Northern Triangle, Collin D. Schueler

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

From 2011–2014, the United States Department of Homeland Security recorded an extraordinary increase in the number of unaccompanied children arriving at the southern border from Central America’s “Northern Triangle”—the area made up of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In fact, in fiscal year 2014, United States Customs and Border Protection apprehended over 50,000 unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle. That is thirteen times more than just three years earlier.

This Article examines the intersecting humanitarian and legal crises facing these children and offers an administrative solution to the problem. The children are fleeing a genuine humanitarian crisis—a region overrun by …

Executive Action On Immigration: Constitutional Or Direct Conflict?, Todd Curtin

Florida A & M University Law Review

On November 20, 2014, the White House released a press statement notifying viewers that President Obama would do everything within his executive powers to solve the problems surrounding the immigration system. The White House made it clear that the President would be acting with legal authority in taking these steps. This paper addresses whether or not the Obama Administration did, in fact, act with legal authority by initiating the following steps using his executive authority: “cracking down on illegal immigration at the border; deporting felons, not families; and accountability through criminal background checks and taxes.” President Obama, acting through Secretary …

The Life Of Crimmigration Law, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This short essay introduces a collection of articles that arose from the Denver University Law Review’s symposium Crimmigration: Crossing the Border Between Criminal Law and Immigration Law, held in February 2015 at the University ofDenver Sturm College of Law. The essay borrows heavily from the Epilogue to my book Crimmigration Law.

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 …

Law-Abiding Illegal Aliens: Paying Taxes For The Chance Of Legal Immigration Statuts, Or Not, Giseli Lemay

St. Thomas Law Review

The tension between the IRS regulations requiring unauthorized immigrants to file taxes, and the United States Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") prohibiting these same individuals from lawfully working in the United States, is an ongoing controversy in this country. The DHS, by means of its Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA") regulations, penalizes unauthorized immigrants who falsely claim to be United States citizens for purposes of obtaining employment, irrespective of whether the aliens filed and paid their taxes. This Comment will focus on the inconsistencies between the IRS and the DHS, and suggest a proposal for amending the INA. Part I …

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.

Invisible: My Experiences With The Undocumented And Abused, Anna Paden Carson

VA Engage Journal

As a legal advocate at Tapestri, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia this summer, I saw many of my immigrant and refugee clients consumed by fear, desperation, and insecurity, and I quickly realized that many of the women I helped only contacted Tapestri because they truly had nowhere else to turn. They were victims of domestic violence and usually living in America undocumented, making the seriousness of their situations that much more intense and pressing. These women were trapped and alone, and Tapestri’s role was to help them in any way we could.

This article explores what I learned throughout my eight-week …

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.

Student Comment: Exchange Cooperation For Visas: Flaws In U.S. Immigration System Criminalizes Trafficking Victims, Laurie Culkin

University of Baltimore Journal of International Law

This student comment explores the Palermo Protocol to the United Nation’s Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, and the United State’s response, the Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act (TVPA). Under the TVPA, the U.S. made a temporary, nonimmigrant visa, the T-Visa, available to trafficking victims illegally located in the U.S., provided that the victim cooperates with law enforcement to prosecute their trafficker. Though at first blush the TVisa seems like a valuable resource to victims who would otherwise find no immigration relief for violations of criminal and immigration law as a result of their victimization, but in practice the flawed process to …

Immigration Policy And The Rhetoric Of Reform: “Deport Felons, Not Families,” Moncrieffe V. Holder, Children At The Border, And Idle Promises, Terri R. Day, Leticia M. Diaz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“Jim Crowing” Plyler V. Doe: The Resegregation Of Undocumented Students In American Higher Education Through Discriminatory State Tuition And Fee Legislation, David H.K. Nguyen, Zelideh R. Martinez Hoy

Cleveland State Law Review

This law review article examines the re-segregation of undocumented students in education, more specifically, re-segregation through state laws and policies impacting their attendance at American colleges and universities. Under no fault of their own, undocumented students are marginalized even further after graduating from high school, since they are not afforded the same benefits as their peers to attend college. This article explores the current landscape of these laws and policies after providing background on Plyler v. Doe and state and federal attempts to challenge education for undocumented students.

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

Faculty Scholarship

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 …

The Mirage Of Immigration Reform, Marcia A. Yablon-Zug

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Status Of Nonstatus, Geoffrey Heeren

Articles

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 …

Intergrating Skills And Collaborating Across Law Schools: An Example From Immigration Law, Anna R. Welch

Faculty Publications

This Essay discusses the design and implementation of introductory Immigration Law courses taught at two different law schools, Western State College of Law in Orange County, California and the University of Maine Law School in Portland, Maine. Although the courses took place on opposite coasts and did not engage in a formal partnership that was visible to students, the authors deliberately planned the courses in close collaboration with one another behind the scenes. In doing so, the courses shared the explicit goal of increasing students’ exposure to practical lawyering skills while reinforcing students’ understanding of the substantive immigration laws. This …

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, …

Supply And Demand: Immigration Of The Highly-Skilled And Educated In The Post-9/11 Market, 48 J. Marshall L. Rev. 419 (2015), Julia Funke

UIC Law Review

Post-9/11 immigration law and policy has had a significant impact on immigrants residing in the U.S. lawfully. Specifically, individuals applying for and immigrating using nonimmigrant employment and education visas have seen a markedly changed environment. Since this directly affects the U.S. economy, its impact cannot be underestimated. Therefore, the sections that follow will address the immigration of the highly skilled and educated in the post-9/11 market, specifically focusing on H-1B visas. Section II will begin with an explanation of the current U.S. immigration system, highlighting the restrictions on employment-based visas. Next, Section III will provide an overview of the H-1B …

A Dry Hate: White Supremacy And Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric In The Humanitarian Crisis On The U.S.-Mexico Border, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

Beginning with the passage of its anti-immigrant “Show-Me-Your-Papers” law in April 2010, S.B. 1070, much has been written about the hostile political climate toward noncitizens in the State of Arizona specifically and the U.S.-Mexico border generally. However, the recent influx of refugees from Central America to the United States has seen a resurgence in the anti-immigrant rhetoric, which is particularly disturbing since a large percentage of the individuals fleeing violence and poverty are children. In this vein, one aspect of the genesis of S.B. 1070 and other anti-immigrant laws that have not received a great deal of attention is the …