The Age of Trump

We are one week into the age of Trump. Two months remain before he takes office. A man who campaigned on a platform of rhetorical violence will soon occupy the highest political office in the United States. Already the effect has been unmistakable. Incidents of hateful attacks have risen sharply. Among the millions of people who fit a description that Trump ridiculed or demonized, fear has become palpable. I have seen the tears and heard the despair. I have felt the threat seep into my daily experience. The day after the election, I awoke feeling a sense of despair. Not because my favored [...]

Reflections on a Donald Trump Presidency

By Linus Chan Bearing witness to sorrow, pain and injustice has always been part of the package deal of being an immigration attorney. Immigration law is diverse, rich and an example of how to define what our country's values are. Deciding who can be our neighbors, co-workers, teachers, and family often requires us to articulate our vision of the United States and how it is to remain a shining light on a hill. I represent non-citizens detained by immigration officials and who face removal from our country and exile from their homes and family. Many of my clients are those people [...]

Bipartisan Immigration Imprisonment

Top Obama administration officials have made much of their concern about the country’s outsized prison population. In 2015, President Obama famously visited a federal penitentiary, the first sitting president to ever do so. In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder championed sentencing reforms targeting low-level drug offenders. And Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates recently announced that the Justice Department would substantially reduce its reliance on private prison operators. But at the same time, the Obama administration has arrested and imprisoned a historically unprecedented [...]

The Demonization of “Criminal Aliens”

By Beth Caldwell In the context of the current presidential debate, the hate that invoking the term “criminal alien” evokes for a large segment of the U.S. population is tangible. In his immigration speech in Arizona, Donald Trump repeated the term “criminal alien” over and over again. Mike Pence followed suit in the October 4 vice presidential debate, using the term three times in a relatively brief response to a question about immigration policy. But the Trump campaign is not alone in invoking the “criminal alien” term. President Obama too has framed his immigration policies using this [...]

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 [...]

Talking immigration prison abolition in DC and Berkeley

The United States has a long and inglorious history of coercive state practices of social control that are motivated, explicitly or implicitly, by race. From chattel slavery to modern incarceration, state actors have regularly marginalized, demonized, and exploited people racialized as nonwhite. No instance is more salient and horrific than the centuries of chattel slavery upon which much of this nation’s wealth is built. Immigration imprisonment—the practice of confining people because of a suspected or confirmed immigration law violation—fits neatly into this ignoble tradition. The United [...]

20 years ago this week…

On September 30, 1996, crimmigration law became firmly embedded in the modern United States. That day, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) took effect. Adopted by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, IIRIRA stands as an example of bipartisan willingness to ratchet up the severity of violating immigration law. With Friday’s twentieth anniversary on my mind, I thought it worthwhile to revisit IIRIRA’s specific provisions and contextualize it within a larger string of strong-armed legislation that launched the crimmigration era. First [...]

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 [...]