Scaring migrants from legal processes

President Trump has made it known that he is no fan of the judiciary. Only one month into the Trump Administration, it appears that ICE is taking its cues from the president. Judging from recent actions, the nation’s lead immigration law enforcement agency seems intent on scaring migrants away from legal processes. In the course of one week, four incidents, seemingly unrelated, might make a reasonable observer think twice about engaging with immigration law authorities. On February 8, ICE arrested several men across the street from a Virginia church where they had taken shelter from the [...]

Beyond Rhetoric: “Sanctuary” in Practice

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehended 680 people over the last week, pointing to the increased role of federal agencies in immigration detention under the Trump administration. While this is still a lower number than the weekly average detained under the Obama administration, it does represent a much larger share of detentions for ICE specifically. Three recent cases of ICE overreach stand out as examples: Guadalupe García de Rayos, an Arizona mother who had checked in with ICE regularly since 2013 to review her status, arrived for her scheduled meeting last week [...]

Constitutional collision in Colorado anti-immigrant bill

By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Christopher N. Lasch The virulent tone of immigration rhetoric that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency has come to Colorado. A Republican state legislator proposes to bar cities or local governmental units from limiting their cooperation with ICE. And then he goes where even President Trump hasn’t dared: criminalizing the very act of voting in favor of limiting cooperation with ICE. The proposal, House Bill 17-1134, titled the “Colorado Politician Accountability Act,” is a constitutional train wreck. If our students submitted this for a course, [...]

Recalcitrant countries and possible diplomatic riffs

Much has been written about the executive orders that President Trump signed last week. Missing from those discussions has been acknowledgment of the potential diplomatic fray President Trump seems willing to bring on by threatening immigrant and nonimmigrant visas to countries that don’t take back United States deportees as quickly as we would like. Section 12 of the executive order titled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” provides, in full: The Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of State shall cooperate to effectively implement the sanctions [...]

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 [...]

Inauguration Day in the Age of Trump

Today, the political world turns to Washington, D.C., where Donald Trump assumes the seat of power. Over the last ten weeks, communities throughout the United States have started to see the effects of his virulent campaign manifested in acts of physical and psychological violence. Migrants--who spent the last eight years living under the most heavy-handed immigration policing apparatus in modern history--have been preparing for Trump's inauguration since then. As I watch events unfold, the need to resist Trump's demonization of migrants while simultaneously assisting the next generation of [...]

Obama’s crimmigration legacy

Next week, President Obama vacates the White House. He takes with him eight years of accomplishments on a wide range of fronts. Throughout his two terms, I have devoted considerable energy to criticizing his shortcomings and, when appropriate, noting the ways in which he has improved migrants’ lives. As Donald Trump takes command of the Executive Branch, the long process of reviewing President Obama’s crimmigration legacy begins. President Obama presided over the most consistently heavy-handed immigration policing practices in the nation’s history. Under his watch, ICE detained hundreds of [...]

Abolishing immigration prisons: Lessons from Italy

Immigration imprisonment is seemingly intractable. The United States Marshals Service imprisons almost 100,000 people suspected of a federal immigration crime. The Bureau of Prisons holds roughly 25,000 convicted federal immigration offenders on a given day. And of course, ICE uses the $2 billion it receives for civil immigration detention to hold approximately 400,000 people waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain. Meanwhile, private prison corporations, county governments, and countless financial investors are attuned to the profits that come with locking up migrants. The [...]