U.S. citizens don’t need the federal government’s permission to enter and exit the United States. They can’t be forcibly removed from the United States, and they can’t be convicted of entering the United States without the federal government’s permission. Put simply, immigration law’s controls on movement are off-limits to U.S. citizens. But what happens when someone doesn’t know they are a U.S. citizen? The short answer is that things get complicated. For the longer answer, let’s turn to the experience of Javier Garza-Flores. Born in México in 1974, he always knew that he was a Mexican [...]
Supreme Court says Biden can end MPP
The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected Republican attempts to hold onto the Migrant Protection Protocols, more commonly known as the Remain in Mexico program. In a split decision that spanned the Court’s ideological camps, six justices agreed that the Biden administration can end the Trump era initiative that turned back migrants at the southwestern border. In a separate opinion, Justice Amy Barrett noted that she agreed with the majority’s analysis on the merits of the dispute but, in her view, the Court should not have resolved those questions. Launched by the Trump administration in [...]
Uvalde massacre & immigration law aid
Another mass shooting in the United States means another instance in which migrants might have been victimized or witness to a crime. Details are quickly developing about what happened in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, but there is no reason to doubt that migrants weren’t present in some form either as students, employees, or nearby community members. After several mass shootings in recent years, migrants have come forward to assist police investigations. The treatment at the hands of federal immigration agents has been checkered, with at least one survivor being deported. It doesn’t have to be [...]
Mistakes aren’t reviewable, Supreme Court says
Who should suffer when an immigration judge messes up? The migrant, a divided majority of the U.S. Supreme Court announced this week. In Patel v. Garland, the Court concluded that federal courts can’t review factual assessments made by immigration judges even when the immigration judge is wrong. Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion which Chief Justice Roberts joined along with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh. Justice Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. This case involved Pankajkumar Patel who entered the United States without the [...]
ICE prosecutorial discretion guidance
This week the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency released guidance about the Biden administration’s approach to immigration court cases. Removal proceedings—the formal name for what most people refer to as deportation proceedings—are to be governed by the detailed memo issued on April 3 by ICE’s Principal Legal Advisor Kerry E. Doyle. In turn, the Doyle Memo builds on a separate memo issued in September 2021 by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. On behalf of the Biden administration, the Mayorkas Memo identified three priorities for DHS officials to use when making [...]
Supreme Court again considers ICE’s detention powers
In a pair of cases being argued today, the U.S. Supreme Court reviews the federal government’s power to detain migrants. This pair of cases, Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez and Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, raise similar legal issues: Can federal immigration officials detain a person indefinitely without the possibility of requesting release from an immigration judge when a person who is not a U.S. citizen has already been detained for at least 6 months and is waiting for immigration officials to decide whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States? In each case, a circuit court [...]
Troubled contractor gets $180 million to hold young migrants
Biden administration officials last month moved $180 million from one troubled contractor to another to ensure that it can keep using two South Texas facilities in which migrant youth are regularly detained. An official notice published in the Federal Register on November 30 indicates that $178,007,159 originally slated to go to Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. will now be paid to Southwest Key Programs, Incorporated. The federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, runs a network of facilities in which young migrants [...]
Chronicling Arizona’s Immigration Politics
Like the California of the 1990s, Arizona is where immigration politics have clashed most fiercely in the last decade or so. In their new book Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Versus the Latino Resistance, journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block dive deeply into the changing politics of Arizona, examining Joe Arpaio’s rise to prominence and the intensity of efforts to defeat him at the ballot box. In a conversation with me, the authors will discuss the changing politics of migration in Arizona and their efforts to cover a story full of big personalities and impactful [...]
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