There are currently 540,000 people in deportation proceedings somewhere in the United States. Most will make their final stance against forced separation from their families and homes without an attorney. This is a shameful mark on our nation’s commitment to justice that should stop. Earlier this month, New York officials took a significant step in that direction by funding a state-wide network of attorneys to represent people undergoing immigration court proceedings while detained. More cities and states should follow New York’s lead. Despite what politicians frequently suggest, deciding [...]
Colorado Republicans target sanctuary cities—again—in pursuit of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda
By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Christopher N. Lasch After suffering a party-line defeat in a state House committee last month, Republican state legislators in Colorado are once more attempting to coerce cities, counties, school districts, and law enforcement agencies to entangle themselves in immigration enforcement. The “Colorado Citizen Protection Against Sanctuary Policies Act” (Senate Bill 281), like the Republicans’ earlier failed bill, is a wrong-headed effort to solve a largely nonexistent problem. Perpetuating the myth of immigrant criminality Following the Trump [...]
Trump asks Congress for $3 billion in supplemental funding for FY 2017
Earlier today, President Trump asked Congress to find $3 billion in funding to pay for the president’s immigration executive orders through the end of September 2017. This request comes as an addition to the billions of dollars Congress has already given the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2017 operations. In particular, the White House requests supplemental funds to pay for the border wall, an expansion to ICE’s immigration detention system, and to prepare to hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents. As the president’s most expensive immigration policing project, the [...]
Constitutional collision in Colorado anti-immigrant bill
By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Christopher N. Lasch The virulent tone of immigration rhetoric that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency has come to Colorado. A Republican state legislator proposes to bar cities or local governmental units from limiting their cooperation with ICE. And then he goes where even President Trump hasn’t dared: criminalizing the very act of voting in favor of limiting cooperation with ICE. The proposal, House Bill 17-1134, titled the “Colorado Politician Accountability Act,” is a constitutional train wreck. If our students submitted this for a course, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
DHS asks for more detention beds, alternatives to detention, prosecutors, & drones
[While all of the information below is accurate regarding the Obama Administration's FY 2016 budget request, it turns out we're already in 2016. I should have written about the FY 2017 budget request (and meant to), but in a late-night blogging oversight I instead wrote about year-old material. My apologies. I'll try to get to the FY 17 budget request next week. I'll leave the FY 16 analysis up as a comparison.] In the last budget request he will make to Congress, President Obama hopes to boost the Department of Homeland Security’s detention network, increase the number of people supervised [...]
New Efforts to Push Private Prisons Out of Immigration Detention
By Mariela Olivares As regular readers of this blog and of César’s work know, the history of mass incarceration is one mired in political and societal efforts to criminalize drug-related offenses, to lengthen prison sentences and to increase the severity of punishment for relatively minor offenses. These general criminal justice system reform efforts, which gained greatest steam in the 1980’s, resulted in an incredible increase in the number of people incarcerated in the United States. As we also know, the concomitant effect on immigration detention was also unprecedented. Although [...]