By Mary Holper In two recent cases, Reid v. Donelan and Brito v. Barr, a federal court in Massachusetts limited ICE’s power to detain people. But by requiring detained immigrants to file habeas corpus petitions to get a bond hearing in immigration court, Chief Judge Saris of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts undercut the strength of her own clear-sighted analysis. Reid and Brito are both class actions challenging immigration detention. For Reid class members, they must file a habeas corpus petition arguing that their detention under a 1996 mandatory detention statute, [...]
On Morning Joe
My book, Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, has been out for about a month and the message that the United States hasn't always locked up so many migrants is receiving exciting attention. I was recently on "Morning Joe," MSNBC's morning news show, to talk about the bipartisan tradition of supporting immigration prisons. If you missed it, watch my conversation with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and their colleagues now. The book has also received a lot of insightful coverage from other journalists. At the Texas Observer, Gus Bova says the book "makes [...]
Op-ed in New York Times & book excerpt
On the week that Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants is officially released, get a preview of the major arguments I raise in an op-ed published in The New York Times. The piece appears online today and in the print edition on December 3. If you're interested in more, you can read an excerpt from the book in Borderless Magazine. Let's not stop there. I would love to talk about the birth, growth, and potential end of immigration prisons in person. Later this week, I'll be speaking about the book in Denver, then I head to Seattle next week. More stops are on [...]
Book Tour: Migrating to Prison
From Seattle to Miami, the United States locks up migrants like no other country. In my second book, Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants ($24.99, The New Press), I describe the sordid reality of immigration imprisonment today. We are only two weeks away from the book’s official release date on December 3, but already it is making its way into readers’ hands. Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, says Migrating to Prison is“essential for anyone trying to understand how the United States came to have the world’s largest [...]
Administration misleads on DACA recipient criminal activity
As the Supreme Court turned to the legality of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, President Trump and one of his top immigration officials made grossly misleading claims about the danger that DACA recipients pose. On Tuesday, President Trump claimed there are 53,792 DACA recipients with arrest records. “That is a very large proportion of the total,” he tweeted. DACA recipients with arrest records: 53,792! That is a very large proportion of the total. @LouDobbs Not good, but we will be able to make a deal with the Dems!— Donald J. Trump [...]
Closing the Ellis Island immigration prison
To mark the country’s first Veterans Day in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, Jr., visited New York’s Ebbets Field, home of the famous Brooklyn Dodgers, to preside over a naturalization ceremony. While he prodded the crowd to engage in the privileges of citizenship, he also announced a dramatic policy shift. The Department of Justice, he explained, would shut down its major immigration prisons along both coasts. At the time, immigration law enforcement responsibilities fell to the Justice Department. In essence, Brownell announced that the United [...]
Immigration policing blurs fiction and reality
Back in 1954, the Eisenhower administration shut down its last remaining long-term immigration holding facility, an immigration prison on Ellis Island. The attorney general at the time, Herbert Brownwell, said that closing the off-shore prison—with an ironic view of the Statue of Liberty—would stand as an example of the “humane administration of the immigration laws.” Hard as it is to believe, the United States teetered on the verge of abolishing immigration prisons. Yet in the decades since this missed chance, a new consensus has emerged. Even today, something that liberals and [...]
Aaron Bobrow-Strain at Denver Law
In the pitched political battles over migration, binaries dominate: Migrants are good or bad, desirable or undesirable, insiders or outsiders. The seesaw of discussions presumes a stark distinction that doesn’t reflect human experience. When it comes to migration, easy answers are hard to come by. The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story, the latest book by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, doesn’t try for an easy answer. Instead, he gives us a complicated narrative of life in the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora, where hope tangles with despair, possibilities and pitfalls merge [...]
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