crImmigration.com

The intersection of criminal law and immigration law

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 [...]

Crimmigration Law Lecture Series Livestream

The Crimmigration Law Lecture Series continues at the University of Denver with talks by Yolanda Vázquez (Cincinnati) and Linus Chan (Minnesota), moderated by Dean Kevin Johnson (Davis).  The live broadcast is available here. [...]

Summer break

I’ll be taking a break from updating crImmigration.com over the Fourth of July holiday and the following week. Updates will resume the week of July 13. Find this information useful? Then let others know about crImmigration.com, as well as César’s Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages. And to make sure you don’t miss an update, subscribe to the blog by entering your email address in the subscription box that appears on every page. [...]

Understanding the modified categorical approach

Few areas of crimmigration law are as confounding to novices and seasoned practitioners as the method by which courts determine whether a particular crime exposes a migrant to removal. Known as the categorical approach, cases expounding on this analytical method’s centrality have become a mainstay of Supreme Court decisions in recent years. Earlier this month, the Court reiterated its emphasis on the categorical approach in Mellouli v. Lynch (for analyses of that decision, see here, here, here, here, here, here). As if to illustrate how maddening categorical approach analyses can be, the very [...]