ICE’s new immigration detainer policy remains legally flawed

Today, ICE issued a new policy regarding use of immigration detainers. Sometimes called immigration holds, detainers are requests by ICE that a local law enforcement agency continue holding someone in the LEAs custody. The purpose of continued confinement is to give ICE time to pick up the individual. The policy announced today instructs immigration officers, including local police deputized as immigration officers pursuant to a 287(g) agreement, to issue detainers against anyone who they have probable cause to believe is removable from the United States. Though couched in carefully crafted [...]

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 [...]

How immigration raids affect birth outcomes

By Arline T. Geronimus On May 12, 2008, 900 ICE agents, armed with military-grade weapons and backed up by a Black Hawk helicopter, descended on the rural community of Postville, Iowa. They raided the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant and detained 389 workers, almost all of whom were Latino. Nine years later, Postville remains one of the most notorious immigration law enforcement actions in the nation’s recent history. While its legal implications have been well canvassed, the public health consequences of mass immigration policing actions like this have remained largely [...]

Lifting the legal fiction that immigration detention isn’t punishment

Time again and again, it’s said that immigration detention is a species of civil confinement. It is not criminal. As a legal matter, that has certainly been the operating assumption since 1896 when the United States Supreme Court explained, “We think it clear that detention or temporary confinement, as part of the means necessary to give effect to the provisions for the exclusion or expulsion of aliens, would be valid.” The Court relied on this statement as recently as 2003 when it declared that “detention during deportation proceedings [i]s a constitutionally valid aspect of the deportation [...]

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 Rhetoric: “Sanctuary” in Practice

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehended 680 people over the last week, pointing to the increased role of federal agencies in immigration detention under the Trump administration. While this is still a lower number than the weekly average detained under the Obama administration, it does represent a much larger share of detentions for ICE specifically. Three recent cases of ICE overreach stand out as examples: Guadalupe García de Rayos, an Arizona mother who had checked in with ICE regularly since 2013 to review her status, arrived for her scheduled meeting last week [...]

DHS issues border policing plans

In response to President Trump’s January 25 executive order on border policing, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo with details about how it plans to carry out the president’s directives. The memo promises to further militarize the Mexican border, expand the nation’s already unprecedented immigration detention capacity, and skirt the immigration court system. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly signed the memo, titled “Implementing the President’s Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Policies,” on February 20, 2017. The memo consists of instructions [...]

Constitutional collision in Colorado anti-immigrant bill

By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Christopher N. Lasch The virulent tone of immigration rhetoric that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency has come to Colorado. A Republican state legislator proposes to bar cities or local governmental units from limiting their cooperation with ICE. And then he goes where even President Trump hasn’t dared: criminalizing the very act of voting in favor of limiting cooperation with ICE. The proposal, House Bill 17-1134, titled the “Colorado Politician Accountability Act,” is a constitutional train wreck. If our students submitted this for a course, [...]