When President Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, his administration’s policy of pushing young unauthorized migrants to the bottom of the immigration law-enforcement priority list, Republicans complained that focusing on some legal violations over others was equivalent to not enforcing the law. When Obama used his discretion to extend similar protections to parents of United States citizens, Republican legislators successfully took to the courts to block him. Within days of entering the White House, President Trump issued an executive order proclaiming, “We cannot [...]
Attorney General delivers fiery speech in defense of the status quo
Visiting the southwest border for the first time since becoming Attorney General, today Jeff Sessions delivered a campaign-style speech promising to bring the federal criminal justice system to bear against immigration law violators. Standing before Customs and Border Protection officials in Nogales, the Attorney General described beheadings, machete attacks, and gang violence. “Criminal aliens, and the coyotes and the document-forgers seek to overthrow our system of lawful immigration,” he claimed. In response, the Justice Department that he leads will “take our stand against this filth” [...]
Scaring migrants from legal processes
President Trump has made it known that he is no fan of the judiciary. Only one month into the Trump Administration, it appears that ICE is taking its cues from the president. Judging from recent actions, the nation’s lead immigration law enforcement agency seems intent on scaring migrants away from legal processes. In the course of one week, four incidents, seemingly unrelated, might make a reasonable observer think twice about engaging with immigration law authorities. On February 8, ICE arrested several men across the street from a Virginia church where they had taken shelter from the [...]
Beyond Deportation: The Relationship Between Prosecutorial Discretion and Criminal Activity
By Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia This blog post will focus on a small but important portion of my new book Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases and specifically the historical relationship between prosecutorial discretion and criminal activity. As a primer, prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases refers to any choice made by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (or its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service) about whether and/or to what extent to enforce the law against a person. While deferred action is the most popular form of [...]
PEP vs. Secure Communities
Last November, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced the end of the Secure Communities program. Beloved by the Obama Administration, Secure Communities (often described simply as S-Comm) came under heavy criticism by advocates, state and local lawmakers, and police officials. Whatever victory advocates could celebrate was short lived. In the same memo in which Johnson announced S-Comm’s demise, he added that DHS would replace it with a new initiative called the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). Since then advocates and scholars have been trying to figure out how PEP differs [...]
17 states sue federal government over its immigration priorities
And so it begins. Republicans have been clamoring about the illegality of President Obama’s announced immigration priorities since long before he stepped in front of the cameras last month. Yesterday they took a crucial first step toward forcing a court to decide whether they’re correct. Led by Texas Governor-elect Greg Abbott, currently the state’s Attorney General, seventeen states and four governors sued the federal government in an attempt to stop implementation of the Administration’s immigration enforcement strategy. Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, State of Texas v. [...]
Executive authority & prosecutorial power in immigration law
Rumors are twirling that President Obama will soon announce his plans for reshaping the immigration law regime through use of his extensive executive authority. The president and high-level administration officials have repeatedly stated that such an announcement will be made before the end of the year, but recent news reports suggest it might happen as early as this week. Much has been written about the extent of the president’s legal authority, including some very well reasoned legal analyses by top-notch scholars. Stephen Legomsky, the former chief counsel at the U.S. Citizenship and [...]
US Dist Ct: ICE agents’ lawsuit against prosecutorial discretion survives
In a decision about a politically contentious lawsuit, a federal district court struck a blow at the Department of Homeland Security’s use of prosecutorial discretion to manage its removal work. Crane v. Napolitano, No. 3:12-cv-03247-O, slip op. (N.D. Tex. April 23, 2013) (O’Connor, J.). The court strongly suggested that it will uphold the bulk of the claims brought against DHS by the ICE union challenging ICE’s prosecutorial discretion memoranda and the specific prosecutorial discretion initiative known as Deferred Action Against Childhood Arrivals (DACA). As I detailed before, the agents [...]