crimmigration.com

The intersection of criminal law and immigration law

Archive

After regularly updating crimmigration.com from January 2009 until November 2022, I have stopped doing so. I hope you continue to benefit from the blog as an archive. For up-to-date information about my work, visit ccgarciahernandez.com. – César

Scholar’s Sidebar: The perils of automated immigration policing

The restrictive immigration legislation proposed and sometimes enacted in states and localities throughout the United States in recent years has pushed immigration status into new territory. For years a person’s compliance or non-compliance with immigration laws was difficult if not impossible to discern in the course of ordinary life. People went to church, school, work, the grocery store, government offices, and even prison without others knowing or even asking whether they had received the federal government’s authorization to be present in the United States. Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, [...]

Questioning Immigration Detention’s Legal Characterization

Immigration detention in the United States has reached gargantuan proportions. Every day approximately 33,000 people are confined while waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain in the country. Over the course of the 2011 fiscal year roughly 429,000 people were confined in an immigration detention facility. To house so many people, the federal government has turned to a vast network of over 200 facilities spread throughout the country. Many of the largest of these facilities are in rural communities many hours from the urban centers that feature robust legal advocacy networks and [...]

Scholar’s Sidebar: CrImmigration in the Age of Fear

It’s not often that a new area of law emerges, but that’s exactly what has happened in the last quarter-century or so regarding crImmigration law. In the first effort to grapple with this developing area from a cross-border perspective, a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines published Social Control and Justice: Crimmigration in the Age of Fear. I was privileged to be asked to review it for the journal Crime, Law, and Social Change. The final publication is available on the publisher’s web site, but a preliminary version is available here. In short, this is an important book that [...]

Strickland-Lite: Padilla’s Two-Tiered Duty for Noncitizens

By now, crImmigration followers are well aware of the test the Supreme Court set out in Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010): when deportation is clearly going to result from conviction, the criminal defense attorney must tell her client as much, but “[w]hen the law is not succinct and straightforward, a criminal defense attorney need do no more than advise a noncitizen client that pending criminal charges may carry a risk of adverse immigration consequences.” This framework, I write in a new article, is highly problematic. Strickland-Lite: Padilla’s Two-Tiered Duty for Noncitizens, [...]

Criminal Defense After Padilla v. Kentucky

In the three-and-a-half years since the Supreme Court recognized that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel requires advice about the deportation consequences of conviction in the landmark Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), courts and commentators have had a lot to say about its impact. Without question, nothing has been more important than the Supreme Court’s decision last term in Chaidez v. United States, No. 11-820, slip op. (U.S. 2012), in which the Court refused to apply Padilla’s holding retroactively. Despite a second round at the Supreme Court, though, not much has appeared [...]

Proportionality in immigration reform Part I: Aggravated Felonies

Jason Cade The fact that a bipartisan comprehensive immigration bill has now advanced to the floor of the Senate is cause for some celebration, but the present bill (S. 744) contains many disappointments, including a failure to address the disproportionate immigration consequences imposed on lawful permanent residents with minor convictions. That failure is all the more apparent when contrasted with the White House’s draft immigration proposal, leaked by the Miami Herald back in February. The Obama Administration’s proposed legislation contained important limitations on some of the harshest [...]

Scholar’s Sidebar: Crime & immigration in Norway

A study by Norwegian researchers found that the older a person was when he arrived in Norway, the less likely he was to engage in criminal activity. Synøve Nygaard Andersen & Torbjørn Skardhamer, Age at Immigration and Crime: Findings for Male Immigrants in Norway 15 (Dec. 2012). The two researchers, both of whom work for Norway’s statistics agency, examined records of all male immigrants to Norway between the ages of 15 and 50 who resided there with a valid residence permit at any time between 1992 and 2007. Nygaard & Skardhamer at 7. They started with a baseline age of 15 because [...]

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 [...]