In a thorough and easy-to-read article published in the latest issue of the Yale Journal on Regulation, Maureen A. Sweeney, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, argues that the decades-old characterization of deportation as a “collateral” consequence of criminal proceedings should be discarded. Sweeney’s article, Fact or Fiction: The Legal Construction of Immigration Removal for Crimes, makes the straightforward argument that “courts have consistently held that removal is not punishment for crime but is instead a remedial civil sanction and a [...]

Last week a reporter for the Brownsville Herald, Jazmine Ulloa, in Brownsville, Texas wrote about Rama Carty, an immigrant detained at the Port Isabel Detention Center in tiny Bayview, Texas in the Río Grande Valley of South Texas. Here is my response to this trend, published in the Brownsville Herald on April 11, 2010: Rama Carty’s lawsuit (Jazmine Ulloa, One Man’s Battle With Immigration Detention Echoes a Multitude of National Concerns, March 28, 2010) should never have happened because he should never have been detained at the Port Isabel Detention Center. Carty’s transfer from [...]

A number of reports that I have come across recently have highlighted a trend that is all too visible in South Texas immigration prisons—the growing number of black detainees.  Black immigrants are generally absent from the immigration debate, but these reports make all too clear that ignoring the unique experience of black immigrants fails to grapple with an important part of the contemporary immigration story. After roughly thirty years of overzealous policing of black communities, primarily through the so-called War on Drugs, the disproportionate interaction of black males especially with [...]