Migration in an altered world

Turning to God in times of difficulty, Psalm 18 counsels the Christian believer, is a core feature of faith. “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer,” it reads. But just as God is a loving figure who supplies a protective pillar, God is also the vengeful spirit who can crush the foundations upon which fortresses built. “Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth.” Environmental catastrophe is nothing new. But climate change is newly testing humans’ willingness to respond to its consequences. In his [...]

Border Patrol shoots, Supreme Court punts

Seven years ago, Border Patrol agent Jesús Mesa shot and killed fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca. On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to tell us whether Hernández’s parents can successfully sue agent Mesa. The aggrieved parents sued Mesa claiming that the officer violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution when he killed Hernández. They wanted Mesa to financially pay for violating their son’s constitutional rights, a claim brought under Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), which recognizes an implied right to sue federal [...]

Attorney General delivers fiery speech in defense of the status quo

Visiting the southwest border for the first time since becoming Attorney General, today Jeff Sessions delivered a campaign-style speech promising to bring the federal criminal justice system to bear against immigration law violators. Standing before Customs and Border Protection officials in Nogales, the Attorney General described beheadings, machete attacks, and gang violence. “Criminal aliens, and the coyotes and the document-forgers seek to overthrow our system of lawful immigration,” he claimed. In response, the Justice Department that he leads will “take our stand against this filth” [...]

Trump asks Congress for $3 billion in supplemental funding for FY 2017

Earlier today, President Trump asked Congress to find $3 billion in funding to pay for the president’s immigration executive orders through the end of September 2017. This request comes as an addition to the billions of dollars Congress has already given the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2017 operations. In particular, the White House requests supplemental funds to pay for the border wall, an expansion to ICE’s immigration detention system, and to prepare to hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents. As the president’s most expensive immigration policing project, the [...]

DHS issues border policing plans

In response to President Trump’s January 25 executive order on border policing, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo with details about how it plans to carry out the president’s directives. The memo promises to further militarize the Mexican border, expand the nation’s already unprecedented immigration detention capacity, and skirt the immigration court system. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly signed the memo, titled “Implementing the President’s Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Policies,” on February 20, 2017. The memo consists of instructions [...]

Removals & returns, 1892-2015

As we begin to become immersed in immigration law enforcement practices under President Trump, I thought a look back at historical practices might be helpful. The information below comes entirely from DHS statistics. President Obama’s enforcement record is familiar to crimmigration.com readers. From fiscal years 2009 to 2015, the United States removed 2,749,854 people and returned another 2,080,307. No data are available for President Obama’s last full fiscal year, FY 2016. As defined by DHS for purposes of these statistics, “Removals are the compulsory and confirmed movement of an [...]

Executive orders on crime include plenty about immigration

President Trump issued three more executive orders on Thursday, this time focusing his attention squarely on crime. Immigration occupies a central position in this latest EO trilogy, illustrating the Trump Administration’s immigration mindset. I printed the orders at random and didn’t make it through the first section before “illegal immigration” made an appearance. The EO titled “Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety” states that it is the Trump Administration’s policy to “enforc[e] the law and develop[] policies that comprehensively address illegal immigration, drug trafficking, [...]

Immigration policing in the age of Trump–early signs

Donald Trump was still standing on the Capitol’s steps waiting to be sworn in as the nation’s forty-fifth president when the White House website announced its plans for immigration. Squarely positioned as a law enforcement matter, President Trump views immigration, the website suggests, as equivalent to rioting and homicides. Much has been written about the White House website shedding all references to climate change. At the same time, the Trump Administration’s digital home launched six issue areas that presumably we can expect to occupy the Administration’s early days. Among those is a [...]