The Fourth Amendment offers a powerful bulwark against the state’s power to deprive people of their liberty. Only with the intercession of a neutral arbiter, the text indicates, can the government exercise its immense coercive powers. Anyone who has followed the evolution of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence over the last three decades knows that this promise is far from the reality. Along the border, however, even the watered-down state in which the Fourth Amendment hobbles along might be too much. Is it possible that a Border Patrol officer might have wielded his weapon too loosely, but the [...]
Retelling migration in the era of global capitalism
The pattern is astonishingly clear. Every year, the U.S. Marshals Service books into its custody almost 100,000 people suspected of entering the United States without the federal government’s permission. Every year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency confines over 400,000 people waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Every year, private prison corporations and local governments reap hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for locking up people suspected to have violated some tenant of migration control. Every year, thousands of people die [...]
Pretrial immigration prisoner trends, part 2
Last week I wrote about the enormous number of migrants who face confinement while they are prosecuted for federal immigration crimes. The absolute numbers are astonishing. Almost 100,000 people suspected of engaging in nothing worse than an immigration crime were held in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in fiscal year 2013 alone. Today I remain focused on the federal government’s pretrial immigration prison population, but I take a slight different approach. To provide some context with which to understand the number of pretrial immigration crime defendants who are confined, today [...]
Detention myopia
In Canada and the United Kingdom, migrants are sometimes confined in prison-like settings. In Malta, they’re held in converted military barracks. Like so many others, these countries have come to rely on imprisonment to enforce their immigration laws. Indeed, I recently reviewed a book that provides an excellent overview of immigration imprisonment tactics in fifteen countries. This blog’s readers know full well how pervasive this phenomenon is in the United States. With over 400,000 people confined every year by ICE, we count the world’s largest immigration prison population (without even [...]
Border Patrol agent gets immunity after killing fleeing suspect
A Border Patrol agent who shot to death a fleeing suspect won’t face legal liability, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit announced last week. Mendez v. Poitevent, No. 15-50790, slip op. (5th Cir. May 19, 2016). Despite being clouded in controversy, the Fifth Circuit’s decision is crystal clear that the claims lodged by eighteen-year-old Juan Mendez’s family members won’t expose Border Patrol agent Taylor Poitevent to any legal repercussions. As recounted in detail by the Fifth Circuit, here is what happened. On October 5, 2010, Border Patrol Agent Taylor Poitevent, uniformed [...]
Policing and humanitarianism in migration control
Every day for years on end the story repeats itself. People fleeing their homelands in search of opportunity or survival lose their lives en route. The developed world—from Australia to the United States—bemoans the lost lives. We observe moments of silence, take pity on the dead, and skewer the smugglers who profit from clandestine migration. Rarely do we look inward to ask how our own policies lead to death. In Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border (2015), anthropologist Maurizio Albahari refuses to let us sit comfortably in our condemnation of others [...]
Obama’s new DHS budget reflects security focus
President Obama released the final budget request he will make to Congress earlier this month and the pitch for DHS is peppered with costly security measures that fall in line with the department’s existing operations centered on security concerns. At almost $41 billion, the DHS budget request covers everything from FEMA operations to the nation’s principal immigration law enforcement bodies, ICE and CBP. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, Budget-in-Brief: Fiscal Year 2017, at 1 (2016). Combined, the budgets for ICE and CBP comprise almost one-third (30.3 percent) of DHS’ total budget, including [...]
Defining crimmigration law: Part III
A working conceptualization of crimmigration law, at least as it plays out in the United States, must start with the radical changes to substantive law that I’ve described in parts I and II of this series of essays on defining crimmigration law. But it can’t end there. As an emergent area of law, crimmigration law is highly functional. Consequently, one of its lasting—and, frankly, devastating—impacts, enforcement, merits as much attention as the substantive law previously discussed. Indeed, I give enforcement methods special attention in Part III of my book Crimmigration Law. Crimmigration [...]