Immigration Law Commons^™

Obama Must Halt Raids On Central American Refugee Families, Lauren Carasik

Media Presence

No abstract provided.

Brief For The Florence Immigrant And Refugee Rights Project And Thomas & Mack Legal Clinic As Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioners, Mondaca-Vega V. Lynch, Hillary G. Walsh

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

The Shibboleth Of Discretion: The Discretion, Identity, And Persecution Paradigm In American And Australian Lgbt Asylum Claims, Heather Kolinsky

Scholarly Articles

While the High Court in Australia has made it clear that discretion is not to be considered when determining if an applicant may avoid persecution upon returning home, there are concerns that discretion persists in the decision-making process with respect to discrediting identity claims. In addition, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom handed down a retooled formulation of discretion, which once again created subcategories of applicants and suggested discretion is an appropriate consideration so long as it is not exercised out of a fear of persecution. This discussion will focus on a comparison of the evolution of LGBT asylum …

Ilhan, Nura, Radwa, Ziagull And Children, Ilhan, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Ilhan, his wife Nura, and their children resided near Kabul, in a region where both the Taliban and ISIS were active. As Shias, Ilhan’s family faced numerous menaces, including threats from ISIS that they would be beheaded if they did not display ISIS flags. Ilhan’s sister Radwa, who is deaf and mute, was forced to marry a regional leader. In addition to being threatened on religious grounds, Ilhan’s family was also threatened by an elder of their town. Out of desperation, Ilhan’s family sold their house appliances, escaped Afghanistan, and arrived at the …

Uniquely Unhelpful: The U Visa's Disparate Treatment Of Immigrant Victims Of Domestic Violence, Rachel Gonzalez Settlage

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Bilal, Bilal, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Bilal was 23 years old when he drowned in Greece. He was cheerful, intelligent, and full of energy.

He was a journalist in Afghanistan who received a death threat from the Taliban. His family decided that he should flee the country alone for survival since they couldn’t afford for the whole family to go.

He escaped from the camp in Moria by finding a hole in the fence. He outran the police, found a ship in port, and jumped on it as it was leaving. He later had 10 unsuccessful attempts to leave Greece for Germany. He was caught by …

Zurvan, Zurvan, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Zurvan and his family had a good life in Afghanistan. He worked as a clerk in a spice shop. After doing business with a foreign company, the Taliban threatened him with death. To escape this threat, he and his family escaped to Iran and hired a smuggler to get them to Turkey. From there, they traveled to Greece in an overloaded boat. They have been living in a camp in Greece, stuck in limbo, ever since. Zurvan feels hopeless, like everyone in the camp is being treated in an inhumane manner. He also feels guilty for bringing his children into …

Aarash, Aarash, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

As an anti-corruption journalist in Afghanistan, Aarash’s family’s life was threatened by warlords. His car was shot at, their guesthouse was bombed, and later when they were threatened at gunpoint, they tried to make a new life in India. But in India, they discovered difficulties in obtaining permanent visas so they had return to Kabul where they hid at a friend’s house for 20 days while obtaining documentation to flee to Turkey. Once in Turkey, they learned that Afghan registries had been closed since 2010. They determined that they needed to either apply for asylum in Turkey or leave for …

Idiris, Idiris, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Idiris is an 18-year-old Somalian refugee now living inUtah. He describes his life, mentioning that he only lived in Somalia for six years then moved to Ethiopia, where he stayed for seven and a half years.His life inEthiopia was peaceful and happy in comparison to Somalia, where Idiris and his family witnessed continuous violence. Idiris’s father eventually learned of the opportunities and education available in America and decided to move his family there for a better life, leaving behind family and friends. Coming to America, Idiris and his family did not know what their new home would be like. They …

How The Lone Star State Reached The Entire Nation: The Need To Limit The Nationwide Injunction Against Dapa And Daca In United States V. Texas, Denise Cartolano

Florida A & M University Law Review

On June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States was ultimately deadlocked in the case United States v. Texas. In just one line, the Supreme Court shattered the dreams of millions of undocumented children and their parents who were residing in the United States; those like Anthony and Maria.The Supreme Court's utterance of these nine words, "[t]he judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court," created instability and uncertainty amongst undocumented children, students, workers and parents. This divided decision upheld a nationwide injunction against President Obama's executive action creating DAPA and expanding DACA.

Although the stories of Anthony …

Rejecting The Children Of Violence: Why U.S. Asylum Law Should Return To The Acosta Definition Of A Particular Social Group, Rachel Gonzalez Settlage

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Fortifying The Rights Of Unauthorized Immigrant Workers: Why Employee-Focused Incentives Under The Nlra Would Help End The Cycle Of Labor Rights Abuse, Caitlin E. Delaney

Journal of Law and Policy

Over the past several decades, there has been an unmistakable tension between labor law and immigration law in the United States. That tension, addressed by the Supreme Court most recently in 2001, still exists for unauthorized immigrant workers who wish to assert their labor rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). While the Obama Administration has made significant strides in easing the concerns that unauthorized immigrant workers may have before filing an NLRA claim, the unavailability of the back pay remedy and the uncertainty of protection from immigration authorities leave little incentive for such workers to assert their labor …

"Immigrants Are Not Criminals": Respectability, Immigration Reform, And Hyperincarceration, Rebecca Sharpless

Articles

Mainstream pro-immigrant law reformers advocate for better treatment of immigrants by invoking a contrast with people convicted of a crime. This Article details the harms and limitations of a conceptual framework for immigration reform that draws its narrative force from a contrast with people-citizens and noncitizens-who have been convicted of a criminal offense and proposes an alternate approach that better aligns with racial and class critiques of the U.S. criminal justice system. Noncitizens with a criminal record are overwhelmingly low-income people of color. While some have been in the United States for a short period of time, many have resided …

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.

American Presidentialism In The Light Of Barack Obama’S Immigration Reform, Rett R. Ludwikowski, Anna Ludwikowski

Scholarly Articles

The main purpose of this article is to bring the reader into an atmosphere of intensity created by the political disputes about the need of immigration reform in the United States. It is unquestionable that problems of the immigrants, who for decades were crossing illegally American borders, contribute to internal political turbulence in this country. This article proceeds on the assumption, that the immigration related problems created a social melting pot which became one of the most serious challenges for the American policymakers. The confrontation of the President with Congress was inevitable. On the one hand, Obama’s administration started to …

Immigration And Naturalization, Kevin J. Fandl, Melanie Glover, Sabrina Damast, Alexandria Sodini

The International Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Toward A New Framework For Understanding Political Opinion, Catherine Dauvergne

Michigan Journal of International Law

This paper was written to frame the work of the Seventh Colloquium on Challenges in International Refugee Law, held at the University of Michigan Faculty of Law, on March 27–29, 2015. To some extent, therefore, it has already served its purpose. It is somewhat tempting in the wake of the Colloquium to completely reconstruct the paper in light of the conversations and conclusions of that event. Such reconstruction, however, would be misleading. Instead, I have chosen to publish the paper in a form that is very similar to its earlier iteration, with a few corrections, clarifications, and explanatory notes about …

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 …

Unconstitutional But Entrenched: Putting Uocava And Voting Rights For Permanent Expatriates On A Sound Constitutional Footing, Brian C. Kalt

Brooklyn Law Review

Eligible voters who have left the United States permanently have the right to vote in federal elections as though they still live at their last stateside address. They need not be residents of their former states, be eligible to vote in state and local elections, or pay any state or local taxes. Federal law—the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA)—forces states to let these former residents vote for President, the Senate, and the House this way. There are several constitutional problems with all of this. Congress heard about many of these problems in the hearings and debates that …

The Wages Of Human Trafficking, Rana M. Jaleel

Brooklyn Law Review

This article asks a deceptively straightforward question: What is the wrong of human trafficking? If the answer seems obvious, a closer look at anti-trafficking law reveals a doctrinal crisis. Human trafficking law has traditionally concerned itself with movement and how compelled or chosen migration estranges vulnerable people from the locales, customs, and resources that might otherwise shield them from exploitation. According to the U.S. State Department, however, movement is no longer a central element of human trafficking. Instead, “many forms of enslavement” are thought to comprise the core of the crime. The revocation of the movement requirement and the equation …

Silent Protest And The Art Of Paper Folding: The Golden Venture Paper Sculptures At The Museum Of Chinese In America, Sandra Cheng

Publications and Research

Housed in the Museum of Chinese in America is the Fly to Freedom collection of paper art, which were produced by a traditional folk method of Chinese paper folding. The 123 paper works were created by detainees of the Golden Venture, a freighter used to smuggle undocumented immigrants into the U.S. On the evening of June 6, 1993, the ship ran aground off the Rockaways in New York City and nearly 300 migrants, gaunt from the four-month ordeal at sea, poured out of the cramped windowless hold of the vessel. Several drowned that night, a few escaped, but the majority …

The United Nations: The Syrian Refugee Crisis, Zahra R. Syed

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The main objective of this research paper is to analyze the international effects the Syrian Conflict has had to the global community. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has declared this conflict to be the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. Millions of Syrians have fled their home country to avoid unjust persecution and are looking to not only neighboring countries, but the European Union for assistance in resettlement.

Since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria in 2011, more than 220,000 people have been massacred, leaving fifty percent of the population in unrest due to home displacement. According …

Applying The U.S. Constitution To Foreign Asylum Seekers: Exposing A Curious, Inconsistent Practice In The Federal Courts, Shalini Bhargava Ray

Marquette Law Review

Asylum law is based on an international treaty, but federal courts routinely invoke U.S. constitutional norms in adjudicating asylum claims. Specifically, they rely on constitutional norms when gauging whether an asylum applicant has suffered harm amounting to “persecution” and whether the harm was inflicted “on account of” a protected characteristic, such as political opinion or religion. In a close analysis of this unusual practice, this Article argues that federal courts have come to inconsistent, and often incompatible, conclusions regarding the use of constitutional norms in the analysis of asylum claims: principally, on whether constitutional norms establish sufficient, insufficient, necessary, or …

Disaggregating “Immigration Law”, Matthew J. Lindsay

All Faculty Scholarship

Courts and scholars have long noted the constitutional exceptionalism of the federal immigration power, decried the injustice it produces, and appealed for greater constitutional protection for noncitizens. This Article builds on this robust literature while focusing on a particularly critical conceptual and doctrinal obstacle to legal reform—the notion that laws governing the rights of noncitizens to enter and remain within the United States comprise a distinct body of “immigration laws” presumed to be part and parcel of foreign affairs and national security. This Article argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent immigration jurisprudence suggests a willingness to temper, and perhaps …

Special Feature Seventh Colloquium On Challenges In International Refugee Law, James C. Hathaway

Michigan Journal of International Law

Refugee status at international law requires more than demonstration of a risk of being persecuted. Unless the risk faced by an applicant is causally connected to one of five specified attributes – his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion – the claim to be a refugee must fail. Because the drafters of the Refugee Convention believed that the world’s asylum capacity was insufficient to accommodate all those at risk of being persecuted, they opted to confine the class of refugees to persons whose predicament stems from who they are, or what they …

The Puerto Rico-Chicago Connection: Cross-Boundary Drug-Treatment In The United States, Sarah Dávila A., Steven D. Schwinn, John Marshall Law School International Human Rights Clinic

Faculty White Papers

1. The John Marshall Law School International Human Rights Clinic is a law school student-practice clinic that is committed to the investigation of human rights abuses, the publication of abuses, and the protection against abuses within the United States and around the world.

2. The International Human Rights Clinic has been investigating human rights abuses arising out of a systematic practice of government officials and cooperating private individuals to relocate homeless, drug-addicted persons to putative drug-treatment centers in Chicago, Illinois. In fact, these so-called drug-treatment centers deprive individuals of their physical liberty; fail to provide adequate food, shelter, and other …

From Surviving To Thriving? An Investigation Of Asylee Integration In The United States, Lindsay M. Harris

Journal Articles

This article assesses the efficacy of the legal framework for asylees, individuals granted refugee status within the United States, through an examination of the human outcomes following the grant of asylum. To understand how the asylee benefits system actually functions, I conducted more than fifty field interviews with advocates, service providers, and government officials in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. This research fills a conspicuous gap in our understanding of what happens after the grant of asylum and reveals a number of insights about the ways in which the prevailing laws, policies, and programs …

The 'New Selma' And The Old Selma: Arizona, Alabama, And The Immigration Civil Rights Movement In The Twenty-First Century, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

In his unfinished manuscript, “The Politics of Expulsion: A Short History of Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law, HB 56,” the late Raymond A. Mohl, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, directly and succinctly identified the true nature of the motivations behind the passage of HB 56 in the Alabama legislature. Professor Mohl observed that “nativist fears of large numbers of ethnically different newcomers, especially over job competition and unwanted cultural change, sometimes referred to as “cultural dilution,” provided political cover for politicians who sought to control and regulate immigration within state borders, but also to push illegal …