In a pair of cases being argued today, the U.S. Supreme Court reviews the federal government’s power to detain migrants. This pair of cases, Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez and Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, raise similar legal issues: Can federal immigration officials detain a person indefinitely without the possibility of requesting release from an immigration judge when a person who is not a U.S. citizen has already been detained for at least 6 months and is waiting for immigration officials to decide whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States? In each case, a circuit court [...]
Troubled contractor gets $180 million to hold young migrants
Biden administration officials last month moved $180 million from one troubled contractor to another to ensure that it can keep using two South Texas facilities in which migrant youth are regularly detained. An official notice published in the Federal Register on November 30 indicates that $178,007,159 originally slated to go to Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. will now be paid to Southwest Key Programs, Incorporated. The federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, runs a network of facilities in which young migrants [...]
Immigration imprisonment is a choice
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 [...]
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