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Justice Department takes swipe at California

On Tuesday, the Justice Department sued California claiming parts of three new state laws intended to protect immigrants violate the United States Constitution. This next step in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement practices isn’t a surprise. On the contrary, the ongoing dispute between federal officials and the country’s most populous and economically productive state has been leading in this direction for at least fourteen months. Now that the complaint has been filed, the irony of the Trump administration’s main legal claim is remarkable. The thrust of the Justice [...]

Immigration offenders lead list of criminal removals in 2015 & 2016

ICE successfully used its massive enforcement resources to target migrants with criminal histories in President Obama’s last two fiscal years in office. Most of those, however, had been convicted of nothing more serious than an immigration crime. Government data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request casts doubt on the Obama administration’s frequent claim that it targeted dangerous individuals. Of the 235,413 people removed by ICE in fiscal year 2015, fifty-nine percent (139,368) had been convicted of a crime. Leading the list of types of crime were immigration [...]

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 [...]

The rest of the National Guard memo

This morning’s news cycle was flooded by reports of a Trump Administration draft memorandum authorizing deployment of up to 100,000 National Guard troops for immigration policing activity. Even as a draft, it’s frightening that the federal government is articulating the kind of extremism not witnessed in the United States since Operation Wetback in the 1950s. Though long decried for its sheer cruelty, as a candidate Donald Trump praised it, claiming it was effective and popular. Fortunately, I am convinced that we are still a few steps away from launching a massive military campaign targeting [...]

The border is already walled

By Sarina Phu While the contiguous United States’ border with Canada extends almost 4,000 miles and the border with Mexico runs half that length, at under 2,000 miles, the U.S.-Mexico border involves a much more complex, expensive system of defense than that of the US-Canada border. The legal path to this extensive system of physical defense began in 1990 with the United States Customs and Border Protection’s Prevention through Deterrence Strategy, recounts Robert Lee Maril in his book The Fence (Maril 56). This constructed fourteen miles of border fence in the beginnings of the United [...]