I didn’t invent the term “crimmigration.” That credit goes to Professor Juliet Stumpf of Lewis & Clark University. Her groundbreaking article The Crimmigration Crisis, published in the American University Law Review, put a name to the merging of criminal and immigration norms that have become so prominent in the decade since then. To call Stumpf prescient would be an understatement. When The Crimmigration Crisis appeared in 2006, I was a new attorney practicing in the South Texas city in which I was born and raised, McAllen. Only a handful of miles from the border, McAllen and the rest [...]
Immigration imprisonment continues to be good for the bottom line, but bad for everything else
Immigration imprisonment is no stranger to the push and pull of vested interests. From private prison corporations that build lock-up facilities to food service vendors, the modern immigration imprisonment regime relies heavily on third parties to provide routine functions. As I write in Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment (forthcoming in the California Law Review), “Having locked itself into the policy choice of using imprisonment to enforce immigration law, the federal government—perhaps inadvertently—created a body of third parties dependent on that policy choice.” Part of what [...]
“Crimmigration Law” book introduction
On Tuesday, I announced that Crimmigration Law, my first book, was just published by the American Bar Association and is now available for purchase here. Today I’m making available the book’s Introduction, a twenty-page chapter detailing what the term means and where this amalgamated area of law derives from. The Introduction also identifies the many actors involved in creating and enforcing crimmigration law—from city police forces to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a hint to how Crimmigration Law begins, here are the first few paragraphs: At its most basic, “crimmigration” law describes the [...]
“Crimmigration Law” book published
Almost seven years and over 600 updates ago, I launched this blog with the goal of creating a one-stop resource about crimmigration law developments. A year later I started teaching about crimmigration law with the goal of training the next generation of lawyers to appreciate the subtlety and importance of understanding how criminal law and immigration law intersect. At about the same time I began writing legal scholarship with the hope of tracking and shaping this emerging area of law. Today I am thrilled to announce that those countless hours of work have coalesced into Crimmigration Law, [...]