Last week Human Rights Watch released a damning report on the federal government’s sustained effort to use criminal law and procedure to sanction immigration law violations. The report, Turning Migrants into Criminals: The Harmful Impact of U.S. Border Prosecutions (May 2013), documents the many ways in which the criminal justice system has been employed to punish conduct that previously was largely dealt with through the civil immigration system or that didn’t often register on the government’s radar. Though the 83-page report has much to offer, there were a few aspects worth [...]
ICE Risk Assessments: From Mass Detention to Mass Supervision?
Mark Noferi and Robert Koulish [Ed. Note: Today, Mark Noferi is joined by Professor Robert Koulish, a political scientist in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland who also teaches immigration law at Maryland’s Carey School of Law. Professor Koulish’s most recent book is “Immigration and American Democracy: Subverting the Rule of Law,” in which he examined immigration control as a laboratory for post-9/11 expansion of U.S. executive power, and he is co-editing “Immigration Detention, Risk and Human Rights—Studies on Immigration and Crime” (2014 release). His [...]
Report: Private prison growth on civil & crim side of immigration prosecutions
Private prisons have expanded at an astonishing rate in recent years and much of that growth can be attributed to immigration imprisonment, according to a new report by the Sentencing Project. Cody Mason, The Sentencing Project, Dollars and Detainees: The Growth of For-Profit Detention (July 2012). Thanks in large part to immigration prisoners, private prison corporations have maintained strong bottom-lines even while the economy has struggled, the report added. The report divides immigration prisoners into two camps: those held under the direction of ICE and those under the United States [...]
Time to Rethink Immigration Detention
Last month’s release of immigrants from immigration detention centers brought praise from immigrants' rights advocates and impassioned criticism from conservative politicians. House Speaker John Boehner decried the decision to “let criminals go free” and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte added, "By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the administration is needlessly endangering American lives." It was no surprise that the White House quickly distanced itself from last month's events. The Obama Administration has expanded the immigration detention population [...]
Scholar’s Sidebar: Immigration prisons need careful eye
Last week the Department of Homeland Security announced that it is releasing an unknown number of detainees (probably in the several hundreds) from immigration detention centers. This may be just another shot in the sequestration battle, but for immigration law observers it’s a surprising move by an administration that has shown great interest in detention. The agency has consistently explained that it will detain as many people as Congress pays for and its track record indicates it’s kept true to its word. Under President Obama, DHS has expanded its immigration detention capacity to record [...]
Scholars Sidebar: The Perverse Logic of Immigration Detention
A few months back the Columbia Journal of Race and Law published my short essay on the rational if unsavory growth of immigration imprisonment. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, The Perverse Logic of Immigration Detention: Unraveling the Rationality of Imprisoning Immigrants Based on Markers of Race and Class Otherness, 1 Columbia Journal of Race and Law 353 (2012). So long as our immigration law enforcement policy prioritizes removal of people who have been convicted of a crime and our criminal law regime disproportionately impacts people of color, then, I argue, we will continue to rely on [...]
Scholars Sidebar: Are immigration detainers illegal?
DHS closed the year with a series of important announcements: its 409,000 removals, it plans to shut down its § 287(g) program, and it distributed criteria for ICE field officers to use to determine when to issue an immigration detainer. To Christopher N. Lasch, an assistant professor at the University of Denver who co-directs the law school’s criminal defense clinic, all of these plus last spring’s blockbuster decision in Arizona v. United States support a claim that the federal government lacks the authority to issue immigration detainers as it has been doing with great frequency in recent [...]
U.S. Immigration Policing in the Season of Presidential Elections
The folks over at the Migrants’ Rights Network, a great advocacy group based in London, asked me to share my thoughts on how the presidential election affects immigration policing. Here’s a slightly revised version of the essay originally published on MRN’s Migration Pulse blog: The presidential election in the United States is two weeks away and both major party candidates, as well as third party candidates, know that high Latino turnout in a few key states has the potential to swing the election. Not coincidentally given many Latinos’ strong immigration experience personally or through [...]