I am thrilled to announce that the second edition of my book, Crimmigration Law, is now available. As the first book to map how criminal law and immigration law intersected in the United States, Crimmigration Law has become a go-to resource for journalists, advocates, and students. Since the first edition of Crimmigration Law was published in 2015, the politics of the United States ricocheted, immigration agencies were thrown into overdrive, and legal institutions rattled. The second edition of Crimmigration Law tracks those developments from the Supreme Court to the border. In the six [...]
Lifting the legal fiction that immigration detention isn’t punishment
Time again and again, it’s said that immigration detention is a species of civil confinement. It is not criminal. As a legal matter, that has certainly been the operating assumption since 1896 when the United States Supreme Court explained, “We think it clear that detention or temporary confinement, as part of the means necessary to give effect to the provisions for the exclusion or expulsion of aliens, would be valid.” The Court relied on this statement as recently as 2003 when it declared that “detention during deportation proceedings [i]s a constitutionally valid aspect of the deportation [...]
Utah Supreme Court: When all else fails, civil procedure can remedy ineffective assistance of counsel
By Sarah Flinn Sergio Meza filed an action under Utah state law for ineffective assistance of counsel after learning of the immigration consequences for his no contest plea to two drug charges pursuant to a plea in abeyance agreement. Meza v. State, 2015 WL 4878268, at *1 (Utah Aug. 14, 2015). Mr. Meza asserted that he had a right to relief under the Post-Conviction Remedies Act of Utah (PCRA) due to the ineffective assistance of counsel, namely, the failure of his attorney to advise him of the immigration consequences of his plea. Id. The Supreme Court of Utah ultimately concluded that Mr. [...]
Book talks in Oklahoma City, New York, Chicago & Valparaiso
crImmigration.com is going on the road! Over the next week I’ll be speaking in Oklahoma City, New York City, Chicago, and Valparaiso, Indiana about my book Crimmigration Law. These talks follow on a series of presentations I did in Texas a few weeks back about the book. While I’m the person who will be heading to the airport, these talks reveal far less about me than they do about the role that crimmigration law is playing in the lives of millions of people. Without a doubt, migrants face the brunt of crimmigration law’s reach most directly. But migrants don’t exist in a vacuum. Despite [...]
Seeing immigration imprisonment as it is
When it comes to policing migrants’ lives, everyone seems able to ignore reality in favor of a more comfortable narrative frame. Republicans constantly claim that the Obama Administration has failed to enforce the nation’s immigration laws despite the unprecedented tally of migrants imprisoned and removed. The President repeatedly claims that his Administration goes after gangbangers and others who pose a threat to the United States, while the federal government’s own statistics reveal that many of the people removed each year have never been convicted of a crime and a substantial minority of [...]
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 [...]
Defining crimmigration law: Part II
Last week I began constructing a working definition of “crimmigration law.” For all its currency in recent years, the reality is that the phrase largely goes undefined—as if we’re supposed to know it when we see it. In the six years that I’ve been writing about crimmigration law, I have been as guilty of doing this as anyone so I’m certainly not pointing fingers. Instead, I’m trying to bring some theoretical coherence to doctrine that evolves rapidly across jurisdictions. As I wrote last week, one major aspect of crimmigration law as I see it is the frequency with which criminal [...]
Defining crimmigration law: Part 1
Criminal law and immigration law both have long lineages and robust bodies of authority defining their contours. In recent years, many people, including me, have argued that the boundary between the two has become increasingly blurred into the crimmigration phenomenon. Coined by legal scholar Juliet Stumpf in 2006, crimmigration has quickly developed as a distinct line of inquiry in multiple disciplines—sociology, criminology, political science, and, of course, law. Despite the growing body of case law and scholarly commentary, few of us who regularly use the term crimmigration have [...]