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 [...]
Limiting immigration imprisonment
Immigration imprisonment is undeniably a core feature of immigration law enforcement. Every year since President Obama took office, ICE has held somewhere in the vicinity of 400,000 people behind barbed wire simply because they are thought to have violated a civil provision of immigration law. Almost another 100,000 are confined while awaiting prosecution for an immigration crime, usually unauthorized entry or unauthorized reentry. States do their part too to ratchet up the likelihood that a migrant will wind up behind bars for doing something related to migration. Arizona has been most [...]
Arizona on verge of increasing jail time for migrants
After a few years out of the limelight, Arizona legislators appear on the verge of reigniting the state’s notorious climate toward migrants. A subtle change to the state’s criminal sentencing statutes promises to substantially increase the amount of time in prison certain migrants face. The proposal, Senate Bill 1377, targets migrants who are in the country in violation of a small number of federal immigration crimes, most notably Immigration and Nationality Act § 275 and 276, illegal entry and illegal reentry respectively. SB 1377 would limit a sentencing judge’s power to tailor the [...]
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 [...]
Illegal Entry Convictions Interrupt Continuous Physical Presence
By Sarah Flinn The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) recently affirmed an immigration judge’s decision to deny an application for cancellation of removal due to a break in the necessary ten year continuous physical presence requirement. Matter of Velasquez-Cruz, 26 I&N Dec. 458 (BIA 2014). The migrant in this case, Ms. Rosa Isela Velasquez-Cruz, was apprehended in the United States twice within just a few days. Subsequent to apprehensions on August 9, 2004 and August 11, 2004, Ms. Velasquez-Cruz pled guilty to illegal entry in violation of section 275(a)(1) of the Immigration and [...]
Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment
Every day, roughly 33,000 people spend the night imprisoned while waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Thousands more are confined on charges of having committed an immigration crime. Others are behind bars because they were already convicted. The substantive law that applies to people in each of these categories differs: civil law governed by the Immigration and Naturalization Act for those in removal proceedings, and criminal law governed by the federal penal code (and, to a smaller degree, its state counterparts). That is largely where the [...]
Immigration detention population drops in FY ‘13, while removals increase to all-time high
The Department of Homeland Security detained a remarkably large number of migrants in fiscal year 2013—440,557—but not as many as the record high reached the previous year. DHS, Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2013 Annual Report 6 (September 2014). Removals, meanwhile, increased to what the department calls an all-time high of 438,421. Id. People convicted of nothing more serious than an immigration offense continue to face removal in increasing numbers. The number of migrants detained over the course of FY 2013 was 36,966 fewer than the 477,523 detained the previous year. To contextualize [...]