Immigration Law Commons^™

Coping With A New "Yellow Peril": Japanese Immigration, The Gentleman's Agreement, And The Coming Of World War Ii, Paul Finkelman

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Struggle To Rise Above The Shadows Before Sunset: A Critical Discussion On The Need To Lift The Expiration And Renewal Requirements Of Daca And Dapa, Anna Oguntimein

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Reasoning that judicial economy is best served when a law enforcement agency determines how to expend its limited enforcemen tresources, the Supreme Court has held that the decision to exercise prosecutorial discretion is presumptively unreviewable.1 In the realm of immigration law, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the recently announced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) promote the goal of judicial economy by imposing a freeze on the deportation of eligible noncitizens who either entered the United States as children or who have a child who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident …

26 States Sue Obama Over Immigration Plan, Lauren Carasik

Media Presence

No abstract provided.

Involuntary Return And The “Found In” Clause Of 8 U.S.C. § 1326(A): An Immigration Conundrum, Matthew J. Geyer

Fordham Law Review

    Illegal reentry into the United States by previously removed aliens is a major problem that has risen steadily in recent years. 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a) punishes such aliens. Specifically, § 1326(a) provides for criminal fines or imprisonment (or both) of any previously removed alien who enters, attempts to enter, or is “found in” the United States at any time after his or her initial removal.

    What does it mean to be “found in” the United States in violation of § 1326(a)? The easy case is when a previously removed alien surreptitiously reenters the United States illegally, remains in the United …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of The Federal Prosecution Of Immigration Crimes, Kit Johnson

Faculty Articles

Immigration crimes are the most prosecuted federal crimes in America. This Article examines the benefits of the federal prosecution of immigration crimes (training, deterrence, and signaling/expression) and balances those benefits against the costs of such prosecutions (court- house costs, alternative prosecution, and incarceration). I conclude that deportation immediately following a conviction for an immigration crime appears to capture the key benefit of this system (signaling/expression) while alleviating its greatest expense (incarceration).

Vast Hordes...Crowding In Upon Us: The Executive Branch's Response To Mass Migration And The Legacy Of Chae Chan Ping, Kit Johnson

Faculty Articles

In this essay, we consider how Chae Chan Ping v. United States influences the Executive Branch’s policy response to mass migration, even today. The fear of mass migration reflected in the opinion, and the Court’s articulation that our government must protect its citizenry from “vast hordes...crowding in upon us,” is a message that still resonates. When it comes to policy, the Chinese Exclusion case is more modern than one might expect. In fact, we see the fingerprints of Chae Chan Ping in the Obama Administration’s current practice regarding the detention and processing of family migrants from Central America, and in …

Chae Chan Ping At 125: An Introduction, Kit Johnson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Case: Chae Chan Ping V. United States, 130 U.S. 151 (1889)

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Immigration’S Plenary Power Doctrine Endures, David A. Martin

Oklahoma Law Review

The plenary power doctrine, traditionally traced to the Supreme Court’s decision in Chae Chan Ping, has persisted despite a steady and vigorous stream of scholarly criticism. This essay undertakes to explain why. First, the Court’s strong deference to the political branches does not derive from the concept of sovereignty. Justice Field’s opinion for the Court invoked sovereignty not to trump rights claims but to solve a federalism problem — structural reasoning that locates the immigration control power squarely in the federal government, though not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. The Chae Chan Ping Court’s deference to the political branches instead …

Scalia’S Short Reply To 125 Years Of Plenary Power, Michael Scaperlanda

Oklahoma Law Review

With its plenary power doctrine, the Supreme Court erred by rejecting the universal in favor of the particular. Liberal immigration theorists, on the other hand, make the opposite error by rejecting the particular in favor of the universal. Drawing on classic international law publicists and the Catholic philosophical tradition, this essay argues that the two concepts—the state’s greater duty toward its own citizens (the particular) and equal dignity and worth of all human beings (the universal)—go hand in hand: complementing each other and giving the state a qualified right to limit immigration along with a qualified duty to admit vulnerable …

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

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Immigration In The Supreme Court, 2009-13: A New Era Of Immigration Law Unexceptionalism, Kevin R. Johnson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Chae Chan Ping V. United States: Immigration As Property, Rose Cuison Villazor

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

“Vast Hordes . . . Crowding In Upon Us”: The Executive Branch’S Response To Mass Migration And The Legacy Of Chae Chan Ping, Margaret H. Taylor, Kit Johnson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.