Like the California of the 1990s, Arizona is where immigration politics have clashed most fiercely in the last decade or so. In their new book Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Versus the Latino Resistance, journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block dive deeply into the changing politics of Arizona, examining Joe Arpaio’s rise to prominence and the intensity of efforts to defeat him at the ballot box. In a conversation with me, the authors will discuss the changing politics of migration in Arizona and their efforts to cover a story full of big personalities and impactful [...]
Tracking ICE Surveillance
In less than two decades of existence, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has developed a sophisticated network of digital surveillance practices that relies heavily on partners in private industry and local government. On Tuesday, November 9, Tracking ICE Surveillance brings together two advocates at the forefront of efforts to understand ICE’s use of surveillance technologies for a conversation about modern immigration policing practices: Jacinta Gonzalez, Senior Campaign Organizer at Mijente, and Nina Wang, a Policy Associate with the Center on Privacy and Technology at [...]
Private prison can’t pay $1/day, jury says
A federal jury in Washington sided with detainees and the state attorney general yesterday in a lawsuit claiming that private prison corporation GEO Group violated state minimum wage laws by paying detainees $1 per day to cook and clean at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. The verdict in two cases, Nwauzor v. The GEO Group, No. 3:17-cv-05769 (W.D. Washington September 26, 2017) and State of Washington v. GEO, No. 3:17-cv-05806 (WD Wash. October 9, 2017), now returns to the jury for it to determine the damages GEO Group owes the former detainees who are part of the [...]
Tort Law Comes to Immigration Advocacy
As legislative attempts to alter immigration law have failed time and again, policies under the influence of executive branch agencies have become critical features of the immigration law landscape. Along with that, litigation has challenged officials’ efforts to mold immigration policies to reflect the political priorities of the administration occupying the White House. Advocates frequently turn to constitutional claims or the strictures of congressional enactments. But a few creative lawyers are turning to much older legal doctrines to advocate on behalf of migrants. In Tort Law [...]
Blocking Haitians, limiting asylum
The disturbing images of Border Patrol agents on horseback attempting to block migrants from entering the United States, widely shared in September, tap a long history of heavy-handed U.S. immigration law enforcement policies. In a public lecture I delivered for the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, a research center at Ohio State University, I described similarities in the decades-long approach toward Haitian migrants in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and in recent months. Even when U.S. asylum law clearly requires physical presence in the territorial United States to request [...]
ICE updates enforcement priorities
A few months later than promised, the Department of Homeland Security today updated guidelines its agents are to use when deciding whether initiate immigration enforcement actions. In a memo signed by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, DHS commits to a comprehensive review of individual migrants to gauge whether they “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.” Adopting three categories of threat, the department’s newest enforcement priorities repeat longstanding criteria. Despite that similarity with past [...]
ICE prison population returns to pre-pandemic levels
Six months into the Biden administration, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is holding as many people as it did before the Covid-19 pandemic sharply curtailed prison populations. In early July 2021, ICE held more people on an average day in its prison network than at any time since April 2020.