Justine N. Stefanelli The US Supreme Court’s decision in Jennings v. Rodriguez, 583 U.S. ___ (2018) (slip opinion), denying bail hearings to thousands of detainees is a serious blow to the rule of law. Detaining categories of people without regard to their individual circumstances is an arbitrary interference with the right to liberty and, at the very least, should be accompanied by procedural safeguards. The most obvious of these is a temporal limit on immigration detention. However, US immigration law provides no maximum. The closest the law has come is the setting of a presumptively [...]
5th Circuit: SB4 can go into force in Texas
When the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 4 on party-line votes, it marked the most extreme immigration measure to make it through a state house since Arizona’s infamous Senate Bill 1070, the so-called “show me your papers” law. Within moments, all eyes turned to the courts. Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit announced that most of the Texas law does not violate the U.S. Constitution. City of El Cenizo v. Texas, No. 17-50762, slip op. (5th Cir. March 13, 2018). As a result, Texas law enforcement agencies and local governments are now blocked from choosing to limit [...]
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 crime cases in the 1970s
Since the last years of the second term of President George W. Bush, immigration crime prosecutions have dominated the national picture of criminal dockets in the federal district courts. In 2016, for example, I previously reported about a staggering 68,314 immigration crime cases disposed of that year. No other category of offense even came close. The second most prosecuted category of offense that year, drug crimes, numbered less than 24,000 prosecutions. It hasn’t always been this way. Traditionally, prosecutors didn’t seek criminal penalties for people who violated immigration law. At [...]
Harboring prosecutions are rare, but attorney general wants more
Earlier this month, federal prosecutors in Arizona brought criminal charges against a local activist who devotes his free time to helping migrants survive the deadly desert route northward. Scott Daniel Warren, prosecutors allege in a complaint accusing him of violating a federal law against harboring migrants, provided two people with “food, water, beds, and clean clothes” for three days. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been a vocal proponent of deploying the Justice Department’s extensive resources against migrants. In a April 2017, he urged prosecutors to ramp up criminal charges for [...]
Two-tiered citizenship in DHS terrorism report
This week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report of terrorism activity that reveals little about terrorism and much about the Trump administration’s view that United States citizenship comes in multiple forms, some of which are more authentic than others. The report, a response to Trump’s travel ban executive order, purports to list terrorist activity conducted by “foreign nationals” since September 11, 2001. It claims that approximately seventy-three percent of people convicted of international terrorism-related charges since then were foreign-born. President Trump [...]
US prison population drops a bit in 2016, including for immigration crimes
The number of people locked up in the United States continued a recent trend of modest decreases in 2016. Along with a one percent decline to the total number of people in a state or federal prison, the nation’s population of immigration prisoners also dropped, data released by the federal government this week reveal. People sentenced to federal prison for at least one year dropped 1.4 percent to 1,505,397 people, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. Of those, 189,192 were in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons due to conviction for a federal offense. Approximately twenty-one [...]
Judges can’t deny bail because ICE threatens removal
Focusing its sights squarely on criminal law’s intersection with immigration law, a federal appellate court concluded that judges can’t deny bail to migrant defendants simply because ICE threatens to deport them. The court’s opinion, in a case involving an illegal reentry prosecution, is an important reminder of the presumption of liberty in United States criminal law—and an equally stark example of ICE’s persistent efforts to pierce holes in that presumption. Mario Ailon-Ailon, a resident of Dodge City, Kansas for seven years, was arrested by ICE and handed over to the U.S. Marshals [...]
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