By Tim Dekkers, Maartje van der Woude & Robert Koulish Migration control has seen an influx of information technologies in order to control mobilities. The traditional means of securing borders with walls, gates and border guards are not considered to be sufficient anymore or, as is the case at the internal borders of the European Union, legislation prevents the implementation of such measures. This poses a problem. Migration is increasingly viewed as a security issue and migrants as security threats, but freedom of movement benefits trade and tourism resulting in economic growth. EU [...]
Family detention to family separation and back
When Attorney General Sessions announced the Trump administration’s family separation policy, all eyes turned to the border. In countless reports, we saw parents brought to federal courts without a clue about their children’s whereabouts and kids winding up in federal custody suddenly alone. Soon enough, the family separation policy reverberated throughout the country. By the time President Trump signed an executive order supposedly backtracking, the administration’s next step was in view: families would be detained together. The trauma of family separation and family detention will be the [...]
Separating families is a choice
When President Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, his administration’s policy of pushing young unauthorized migrants to the bottom of the immigration law-enforcement priority list, Republicans complained that focusing on some legal violations over others was equivalent to not enforcing the law. When Obama used his discretion to extend similar protections to parents of United States citizens, Republican legislators successfully took to the courts to block him. Within days of entering the White House, President Trump issued an executive order proclaiming, “We cannot [...]
Under Trump, ICE No Longer Recommends Release for Immigrants in Detention
Kate Evans & Robert Koulish In summer 2018, the Trump administration ratcheted up its immigration enforcement and detention practices with new family separation and forced detention, as part of its “zero tolerance” strategy aimed at deterring asylum applicants from exercising their asylum rights under the 1980 Refugee Act. Part of its effort was to manipulate the immigration risk detention tool, known as the risk classification assessment, or RCA. The risk tool was designed during the Obama administration to reduce the arbitrary detention of immigrants by tailoring it to risk. A new [...]
Criminal prosecution data reveal longstanding practices & disparities
Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against more migrants in May 2018 than at any other time since Donald Trump became president, newly-released government statistics obtained by the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse reveal. But despite the administration’s “zero tolerance” approach, most people apprehended by Customs and Border Protection officers never found themselves in a criminal courtroom. Only about one-third of people apprehended in May outside of ports-of-entry were prosecuted criminally. As the report’s authors point out, this shows that the zero tolerance policy [...]
Undercutting Naturalization
By Patricia M. Corrales I joined the INS, then part of the Department of Justice, in March of 1995. Within weeks of becoming a trial attorney, my boss and mentor, assigned me a very unique case representing the agency in a federal case involving the naturalization of Filipino war veterans. Some Filipino nationals, during World War II, had shown their loyalty to this country by serving in the Armed Forces of the United States, and were promised naturalization. When some of these Filipino war veterans filed petitions for naturalization, INS denied their petitions claiming their names could [...]
ICE ignores detention oversight, Inspector General finds
ICE audits its detention centers, but too infrequently too keep anyone in check and doesn’t follow up to make sure changes are made, a government report issued last month disclosed. The agency has very little capacity to make sure that its sprawling network of over 200 immigration prisons meets the government’s own standards. Worse, glaring deficiencies go uncorrected, sometimes deliberately, because ICE’s oversight system is hobbled by lack of funding and under-attention. The DHS Inspector General’s document, issued June 26, reads like an ICE abolitionist’s talking points. Inspections are [...]
Resisting family separation and family detention in South Texas
President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant families is quickly morphing into the expansion of an existing policy of detaining families. At the end of June, the federal government announced that an immigration prison—the Port Isabel Service Processing Center—would be its “primary family reunification and removal center,” though it has since walked that policy back. We work out of this facility and have visited it many times. Call it what they like, this is a prison. That Port Isabel is at the center of the administration’s new policy to expand family detention only underscores [...]
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