In a new online magazine called Inquest: A Decarceral Brainstorm, I wrote about options available to the Biden administration to reduce the size of ICE's prison population. "In immigration prisons, mundane administrative decision-making masks physical trauma and violence. Under President Obama, they thrived. In the era of Donald Trump, they were glorified. Under President Biden, they should close. Instead, they are filling," I wrote in Immigration Imprisonment is a Choice. Describing specific concrete actions that the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security could take, [...]
Supreme Court expands ICE detention power
In a split decision, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency can detain some migrants who fear for their lives if deported without giving them even the power to ask for release. The 6-3 decision, Johnson v. Guzman Chavez, No. 19-897 (U.S. June 29, 2021), expands ICE’s mandatory detention power over people who have previously been ordered removed from the United States, but who immigration officials find in the country. A dissenting opinion written by Justice Breyer would have adopted an alternative reading of key statutory language that would have [...]
Immigration crime defendant prison population grows, then falls, under Trump
President Trump made much of his antipathy toward migrants. From his perch at the U.S. Justice Department, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, worked hard to operationalize the president’s racist rhetoric. In April 2017, less than three months into the Trump administration, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors to treat five primary immigration crimes as “higher priorities.” Government records about the federal prison population suggest that prosecutors heeded the attorney general’s directive, but only for a time. From fiscal year 2018, which began in October 2017, to fiscal [...]
With Biden returning to White House, private prison stock falls
As the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election began pointing toward a Biden-Harris administration, private prison companies took a financial hit. Over a few days, CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies in the United States, saw their stock prices drop substantially. Both companies had benefited from the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies. Noticias Telemundo. November 7, 2020. In just a few days, though, investors seem to have grown concerned about the future of the private prison industry under a Biden presidency. From November 3 to [...]
New York Review of Books
Two weeks before a referendum on the extraordinary presidency of Donald J. Trump, it's easy to imagine that everything that the U.S. government has done under his watch has been new and innovative in its destructiveness. But "in Migrating to Prison César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández shows that the machinery of separation has long stretched deep into the interior, consisting of a vast network of immigrant detention centers that now reach almost every state in the nation," Francisco Cantú writes in the New York Review of Books. Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River, reveals how present-day [...]
Fund Immigrant Defense, Promote Justice
Gritty North Oakland Street in Aurora doesn’t look like the kind of place where justice meets its match. But across from the self-storage and facing a row of battered warehouses, guards parade migrants into courtrooms where judges decide if they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Whether newcomers to the United States asking for asylum or green-card holders with decades in Colorado, most will not have a lawyer walk into court with them. Unlike the criminal justice system, immigration courts in the United States don’t guarantee lawyers. People who can afford a lawyer can hire [...]
Defund Police, Limit ICE
By the time Antonio Arceo answered a call from his wife’s cell phone and heard a stranger’s voice asking if he knew Roxana García, a simple run-in with the police was plunging their family into a nightmare. The stranger was a sheriff’s deputy who had stopped García for speeding, then arrested her for not carrying a license. She spent one night at a county jail about an hour west of Chicago, then federal immigration officers took her. Soon García would be deported. What began as an ordinary run-in with local cops ended in a family’s separation. Every day, local police are the entry point [...]
Dip in families detained by ICE
The Trump administration’s anti-migrant policies are well known and multifaceted. Interestingly, the government’s heavy-handed approach is showing up in fewer detained families at ICE’s “family residential centers.” Data I obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that there were substantially fewer children held alongside their parents in September 2019 than at that point one or two years earlier. From October 2016 to September 2019 (ending on September 14, 2019), the number of people held in ICE’s family immigration prisons peaked in May 2018 when, on an average day, the [...]
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