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 [...]
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 [...]
Two-tiered citizenship in DHS terrorism report
This week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report of terrorism activity that reveals little about terrorism and much about the Trump administration’s view that United States citizenship comes in multiple forms, some of which are more authentic than others. The report, a response to Trump’s travel ban executive order, purports to list terrorist activity conducted by “foreign nationals” since September 11, 2001. It claims that approximately seventy-three percent of people convicted of international terrorism-related charges since then were foreign-born. President Trump [...]
When a criminal alien isn’t
In conversations about immigration law reform, migrants with criminal records are something of a bogeyman. Like President Obama before him, President Trump claims that his administration’s immigration law-enforcement priorities target so-called criminal aliens. Even advocates frequently turn their backs on migrants who have run up against the criminal justice system. In New York City and Los Angeles, for example, elected officials have insisted that people convicted of certain crimes not benefit from public money intended to help migrants avoid immigration detention and deportation. In Denver, [...]
Narratives of criminalization and resistance
“Immigrants are not criminals.” This was a frequent refrain of the mass mobilizations of 2006 that put a stop to the harshest immigration legislation to win widespread congressional support in a decade. Many immigrants’ rights advocates continued using a form of this narrative frame in the years that followed. So too did Obama Administration officials. Under his watch, ICE repeatedly touted its prioritization of “criminal aliens.” Indeed, President Obama famously described his Administration’s immigration law enforcement focus as “felons, not families.” Whatever the rhetoric’s value, the [...]
5 Cir: You can’t make up constitutional provisions
In a harsh rebuke to roughly thirty-five years of government practice, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit exposed the government’s repeated reliance on a non-existing constitutional provision to deny U.S. citizenship claims by children born out of wedlock in México. Saldana Iracheta v. Holder, No. 12-60087, slip op. (5th Cir. September 11, 2013) (Reavley, Elrod, and Graves, JJ.). Judge Graves wrote the panel’s decision. This case involved an individual who was born in México to a U.S. citizen father and Mexican citizen mother who were not married to each other. As an adult, [...]