February 07, 2024

The Great Escape: Immigration Slavery in America - A True Story of Forced Labor and Liberation (Video)

Free Video "Author Saket Soni and panelists discuss his book The Great Escape , which tells the astonishing true story of a group of immigrants trapped in the largest human trafficking scheme in modern U.S. history. Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of modern-day forced labor, The Great Escape — named a 2023 best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, and Amazon — takes us...

February 06, 2024

“Endless Nightmare”: Torture and Inhuman Treatment in Solitary Confinement in U.S. Immigration Detention

Physicians for Human Rights, Feb. 6, 2024 " This report – a joint effort by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRCP), and researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) – provides a detailed overview of how solitary confinement is being used by ICE across detention facilities in the United States, and its failure to adhere to its own...

February 05, 2024

How Much Has Texas Spent to Expel Migrants? $124 Million Dollars!

Monica Madden, KXAN, Feb. 2, 2024 "Texas has spent more than $124 million sending buses of migrants to sanctuary cities, according to records obtained by Nexstar. According to documents Nexstar obtained, Texas has paid $124,603,616.19 to bus more than 100,000 migrants from the state’s border communities to Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver and Los Angeles as of Jan. 10. That equals...

February 05, 2024

ICE Subjected Immigrants in Detention to Unnecessary Surgeries, Report Finds

Raul Pinto, Immigration Impact, Feb. 2, 2024 "The Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (OIG) published a report last month finding that nearly one-third of medical procedures performed on immigrants in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody were not properly authorized. The report found that ICE improperly authorized 32% of major surgeries performed on individuals...

February 04, 2024

Expert: "Closing" the Border Would Violate Asylum Law

Maria Ramirez Uribe, PolitiFact, Feb. 2, 2024 "President Joe Biden says he has done everything under his authority to try to reduce illegal immigration at the U.S. southern border, and that he’ll be able to do more once Congress passes a new bill. But Republicans disagree. Biden said Jan. 26 that he’s waiting for a bipartisan bill being negotiated in the Senate to give him more resources and "a...

February 02, 2024

Expert: Texas Statute a "Frontal Assault" on Federal Immigration Law

David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 1, 2024 "For more than a century, immigration and border enforcement have been seen as falling exclusively under federal control, and when states tried to exert a greater role, courts shut them down. Texas is now moving to challenge that legal interpretation with the more conservative Supreme Court majority. And the outcome may turn on a lone 2012 dissent by the late conservative...

January 31, 2024

Chevron, Brand X, Auer, Kisor and Immigration Law: It's Complicated

Cyrus D. Mehta and Kaitlyn Box have thoughts: "The Supreme Court on January 17, 2024 heard arguments in two cases – R elentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo – that may determine whether courts will continue to give deference to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous federal statute as held in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense...

January 30, 2024

Expert: On Balance, EB-5 Investor Visa "A Good Program"

Sheelah Kolhatkar, New Yorker, Jan. 29, 2024 "For five hundred thousand dollars (the amount has since risen to nine hundred thousand), foreign investors and their families became eligible for green cards, so long as that money succeeded in creating at least ten jobs. “On balance, it’s a good program,” Stephen Yale-Loehr , a law professor at Cornell, said, “in that projects that couldn’t...

January 30, 2024

Expert: Migrants Will Keep Coming "No Matter What"

Nell Salzman, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 28, 2024 "As negotiations faltered Friday, Biden released a statement saying a bipartisan group of senators have been working around the clock over the past two months to address the border crisis and that the deal being hashed out would empower him to shut down the border. ... “People who are fleeing likely don’t read The New York Times. They are going to come no...

January 29, 2024

Prof. Stephen I. Vladeck on the Border, the Constitution, and Gov. Abbott

Essential reading for con law and border buffs: 1. Federalism at the Border : "...My goal in this post is to provide a bit of a broader overview of what the Supreme Court has said about the relative roles and responsibilities of state and federal governments when it comes to immigration policy (and federal law enforcement, more generally)—with an eye toward explaining (1) the difference between states supplementing...

January 26, 2024

Expert: Lack of Work Permits, Legal Avenues Stymie Migrants

Carine Hajjar, Boston Globe, Jan. 26, 2024 "[C]urrent policies at the border funnel migrants into a system where their long-term legal claim to "the American dream" is uncertain, and for many, unlikely. ... In the end, many migrants "will lose [their case for] asylum, either because they don't have an attorney to represent them or they don't have a strong case on the merits," says Stephen...

January 25, 2024

Migration at the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Challenge Decades in the Making: MPI Report

Alan D. Bersin, Nate Bruggeman and Ben Rohrbaugh, MPI, Jan. 2024 "U.S.-Mexico border security has been a central policy matter and divisive political issue in the United States for decades. The U.S. border control enterprise has faced two distinctly different eras of unauthorized migration: The first, from the 1980s through the early 2010s, was addressing overwhelmingly Mexican seasonal adult flows. The current...

January 25, 2024

Shelby Park Showdown Update (Jan. 25, 2024)

On Jan. 23, 2024 DHS sent this letter to TX A.G. Paxton. On Jan. 24, 2024 TX Gov. Abbott replied here . Federal courts expert Prof. Steve Vladeck posted this on Twitter (a.k.a. "X"): "Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution prevents states from doing exactly what Abbott is proposing (responding to claimed invasions on their own) “without the consent of Congress.” By this...

January 24, 2024

Expert: Supreme Court's Chevron Decision Could Affect International Student Policy

Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 24, 2024 "A pair of U.S. Supreme Court cases about whether commercial fishermen can be forced to pay the cost of federal monitors could have far-reaching implications for regulations affecting international students, including those that govern Optional Practical Training, the popular work program for foreign graduates of American colleges. “Colleges and...

January 24, 2024

TRAC: Too Few Immigration Attorneys; EOIR Bars Access to Vital Data

TRAC, Jan. 24, 2024 "There is widespread agreement that the Immigration Court has far too few judges and support staff to handle newly arriving cases let alone process their backlog of cases which has been piling up for decades. While 1,490,480 cases were filed last year, the Court backlog at the end of December 2023 has grown to 3,287,058 cases. More judges alone won’t be sufficient. There is another serious...

January 24, 2024

Lexis + AI: Transform Your Legal Work

LexisNexis "Using the fastest legal generative AI with conversational search, drafting, summarization, document analysis, and linked hallucination-free legal citations."

January 24, 2024

Free Webinar: AI Goes to Law School

LexisNexis University "Date 02/21/2024 Time 1:00pm - 2:00pm Eastern Time (US & Canada) Presenters: Kristen Baginski, Celeste Pometto DiNicola The November 2022 public release of ChatGPT ushered in a new AI era. ChatGPT gained 100 million active users by January 2023 and set off a race among tech giants to jump in with similar technologies, including Bard, Bing, X.AI, Claude, Llama 2 and Lexis! Understanding...

January 24, 2024

Expert: Be Wary of Immigration Guarantees

Claire Fahy, New York Times, Jan. 22, 2024 "A Bronx lawyer and his son were arrested on Monday and charged with orchestrating a seven-year immigration scheme that defrauded hundreds of immigrants and caused some of them to be deported, federal prosecutors said. The lawyer, Kofi Amankwaa, 69, and his son, Kofi Amankwaa Jr., 37, advised clients seeking green cards to sign petitions under the Violence Against Women...

January 22, 2024

Supreme Court (5-4) Says OK for DHS to Cut TX Razor Wire at Border

DHS v. Texas, Jan. 22, 2024 "The application to vacate injunction presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is granted. The December 19, 2023 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, case No. 23-50869, is vacated. Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Kavanaugh would deny the application to vacate injunction."

January 22, 2024

Free Webinar: Immigration Slavery in America - A True Story of Forced Labor and Liberation

Tuesday, February 06, 2024, 2pm EST - REGISTER HERE "This webinar features a discussion of author Saket Soni’s The Great Escape , which tells the astonishing true story of a group of immigrants trapped in the largest human trafficking scheme in modern American history. Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of modern-day forced labor, The Great Escape — named a 2023 best book of the...

January 19, 2024

Organizations Urge Federal Clemency for Military Veterans Vulnerable to Deportation

ACLU So. Cal., Jan. 18, 2024 "Organizations representing noncitizen military veterans whose federal criminal convictions make them vulnerable to deportation are urging President Biden to use his pardon power to ensure people who have served our nation are not exiled from the only country they have ever known as home. In a letter sent to Elizabeth Oyer, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, the American...

January 19, 2024

Biden at the Three-Year Mark: The Most Active Immigration Presidency Yet

MPI Policy Beat, Jan. 19, 2024 "This article reviews the major immigration actions during the Biden administration’s first three years, focusing on border enforcement, interior enforcement and impacts on U.S. cities, humanitarian protection, the immigration courts, and legal admissions."

January 18, 2024

Most Trump-Era Immigration Policies Still In Effect

According to the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, as of Dec. 25, 2023 , of the 1,027 Trump actions, 684 are fully in effect, 57 are partially in effect, and 294 are not in effect. 333 were acted upon by the Biden administration, 108 were acted on by the courts, and 21 were allowed to expire.

January 18, 2024

Expert: Every Branch of Government is to Blame for Immigration Problems

Maria Ramirez Uribe, PolitiFact, Jan. 17, 2024 "As members from separate branches of government point fingers at one another, the persistent situation at the border leaves voters with plenty of questions. "What branch of government is ‘really’ responsible for the crisis at the border?" a reader asked PolitiFact in an email. Is it the president or Congress? ... "Each of the three branches...

January 18, 2024

Shelby Park Standoff Update (Jan. 18, 2024)

On Jan. 15, 2024 the U.S. Solicitor General filed this pleading at the Supreme Court. On Jan. 17, 2024 Texas A.G. Paxton replied, here and here .