August 29, 2022

Barcode Bracelet Battle

Sonia Rincón, ABC7NY, August 25, 2022 "Five buses filled with migrants from Texas arrived in New York City Thursday, one day after dozens of migrants arrived wearing bracelets with bar codes. City officials said they had heard stories about the bracelets but hadn't seen them on migrants in New York City until Wednesday. According to the city, officials were alarmed when they discovered that nearly all 237 migrants...

August 26, 2022

IJs Allow Asylum-Seekers to Remain in USA

URIEL J. GARCÍA, Texas Tribune, AUG. 26, 2022 "Willian woke up before dawn on a recent Tuesday, packed his legal documents into a blue folder and got in a van with other migrants to one of the international bridges that connect El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. At the port of entry, the 46-year-old asylum-seeker from Ecuador was disenrolled from the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. The U.S. Supreme Court recently...

August 26, 2022

ACLU OF WISCONSIN RELEASES REPORT ON IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT IN WISCONSIN, EXPOSING THE JAIL-TO-DEPORTATION PIPELINE

ACLU Wisconsin, Aug. 25, 2022 "The ACLU of Wisconsin today released a report investigating the nature of immigration enforcement in Wisconsin, detailing how close collaboration between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is creating a jail-to-deportation pipeline in Wisconsin. The report exposes how formal and informal agreements between local sheriffs and ICE, the illegal detention...

August 24, 2022

Policy Brief | Prejudicial And Unreliable: The Role Of Police Reports In U.S. Immigration Detention & Deportation Decisions

NIJC, July 14, 2022 "The U.S. immigration system routinely detains and deports immigrants on the basis of an arrest or criminal conviction — tearing them away from livelihood, family and community. The weighty decision of who to detain and deport often turns on the contents of a single document: a police report. NIJC analyzed the use of police reports in immigration decision-making, surveying our own legal teams...

August 24, 2022

New Mexico Won’t Deny Law Licenses Over Immigration Status

Morgan Lee, Associated Press, Aug. 23, 2022 "New Mexico will no longer deny licenses to practice law solely because of an applicant’s citizenship or immigration status, including some aspiring law students who arrived in the U.S. as children and don’t have a clear path to citizenship. Announced Monday, the rule change from the New Mexico Supreme Court is scheduled to take effect Oct. 1. Several states already have...

August 24, 2022

IRAP Shares an Extensive Collection of Refugee Processing Documents Obtained Through FOIA

IRAP, Aug. 2022 "Through the Freedom of Information Act, IRAP has obtained an  extensive collection of documents related to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program . Together, these documents shine a light on the generally opaque U.S. refugee processing system.  In 2019, amid an unprecedented multi-year attack on the U.S. refugee system, IRAP filed a  lawsuit  seeking records withheld by federal agencies to explain...

August 23, 2022

$1.8 Billion in Wages Stolen by H-2B Visa Employers

Daniel Costa, Economic Policy Institute, Aug. 18, 2022 " Data from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services shows that there were nearly 117,000 H-2B workers in 2021 , and the program is projected to grow to more than 150,000 workers in 2022 , a new high. Why does that matter? Because as this growth occurs, migrant workers with H-2B visas are being employed in industries in which there is extensive wage...

August 23, 2022

Not "Your Regular Wetbacks" - Texas Judge

Jolie McCullough, Texas Tribune, Aug. 22, 2022 "A prominent judge in Texas Gov.  Greg Abbott ’s  border security operation to arrest and jail migrants  on trespassing charges has been accused of using a racist slur against Latino defendants. A defense attorney told the State Commission on Judicial Conduct last week that [80-year-old] Judge Allen Amos told her the trespassing defendants weren’t “your regular wetbacks...

August 22, 2022

William Van Wyke

Hon. Jeffrey S. Chase, Aug. 22, 2022 "On August 14, the immigration law community lost a true giant. William Van Wyke, a former Immigration Judge, advocate, and scholar unexpectedly passed away. How does one capture William’s essence? I’m going to attempt to do so through his own words (in bold), taken from both public sources and emails he wrote to his former Immigration Judge colleagues in conversations after...

August 20, 2022

Old-School ANTIFA: Hon. Guido Calabresi

We Were Outsiders. Conversation with Guido Calabresi "In this conversation Judge Guido Calabresi, a long time friend of Centro Primo Levi, shares stories of his family’s flight from Fascist Italy —from Milan to Yale— and the ways his childhood experiences have shaped his personal and professional life in the USA. This spring, Calabresi has appeared as a panelist in our presentation of Giana Pontecorboli’s...

August 20, 2022

Inadmissible: The Podcast

"Immigration. It’s in the news, it’s in the headlines, it’s a political flashpoint. It generates a lot of sound and fury, a lot of strong ideas and raised voices. And for most of us, it can be hard to sort through all that noise and understand – what is actually going on? What’s legal for people to do, and what’s not? How do U.S. immigration rules affect people’s lives? What is it like to deal with the barriers ...

August 18, 2022

40+ Organizations Call for Justice Over Sham University Set Up By ICE

NIPNLG, Aug. 9, 2022 "More than 40 social justice organizations sent a  letter  today to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) demanding an investigation into DHS' operations related to the University of Farmington and redress for the students who were targeted. In conjunction with the letter, attorneys representing the students also filed a  civil rights...

August 17, 2022

Justice Barrett and the Fate of the Mayorkas Prosecutorial Discretion Memo

Cyrus D. Mehta, Kaitlyn Box, Aug. 16, 2022 "On July 21, 2022, the Supreme Court  granted certiorari  in  United States v. Texas , which involves a challenge to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement priorities as originally laid out in the 2022  Mayorkas Memo . Pursuant to these priorities, ICE would have prioritize the apprehension and removal of noncitizens who pose a threat to “national...

August 16, 2022

A New Campaign to Get the Border Patrol to Stop Trashing Asylum Seekers’ Possessions

Melissa del Bosque, The Border Chronicle, Aug. 16, 2022 “There’s really no reason for what they’re doing other than to strip people of their humanity.” Volunteers from the community and the county maintain these two dumpsters where asylum seekers are forced to leave behind their possessions in Yuma. (Photo credit: Melissa del Bosque)

August 15, 2022

Time to Treat Afghan Allies With Same Respect as Those Fleeing Ukraine

Margaret D. Stock, The Hill, Aug. 15, 2022 "In the months following Russia’s winter invasion of Ukraine, President Biden announced the U.S. would accept up to 100,000 Ukrainians and established “Uniting for Ukraine,” a program that streamlines and expands the humanitarian parole process for Ukrainians to gain admittance to America. The United States’s immediate action and strong commitment...

August 12, 2022

How the Trump White House misled the world about its family separation policy: Terry Gross, Fresh Air

Terry Gross, Fresh Air, Aug. 11, 2022 " The Atlantic 's Caitlin Dickerson spent 18 months filing lawsuits for documents to put together the story of the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant families at the border.  "The Secret History Of The U.S. Government's Family-Separation Policy" is the cover story of the new issue of The Atlantic magazine. This investigative article was...

August 11, 2022

The Most Dangerous Police Force: A Podcast with Geographer Reece Jones about His New Book on the Border Patrol

Todd Miller, The Border Chronicle, Aug. 11, 2022 " Have you ever wondered how the Border Patrol  got so much power? How it can roll into places like Portland, Oregon, in unmarked vehicles and snatch protesters off the streets? Or why it is permitted to racially profile? In this discussion with the prolific geographer  Reece Jones , author of the new book  Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most...

August 09, 2022

New Data Sheds Light on What Happens to People Found Inadmissible at U.S. Ports of Entry

TRAC, Aug. 9, 2022 "People arriving at each of the more than 300 U.S. ports of entry must be inspected by Office of Field Operations (OFO) officers employed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) before being allowed into the country. As a result of this inspection, over the past decade CBP officers working at ports of entry have determined over 3 million times that individuals before them were “inadmissible” because...

August 09, 2022

With Migrant Deaths Mounting, Border Residents Organize to Save Lives

Melissa del Bosque, The Border Chronicle, Aug. 9, 2022 "Every week, Joel Smith, a former Marine, drives into the desert to leave water for migrants trekking through the Devil’s Highway and other deadly corridors in the Sonoran Desert. Smith is operations manager for Humane Borders, a nonprofit volunteer organization founded in Tucson, Arizona, more than two decades ago. The organization came together in response...

August 08, 2022

The Secret History of Family Separation

Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic, August 2022 "... Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of...

August 05, 2022

Expert: CBP is NOT Handing Out Social Security Numbers to Border Crossers

Josh Kelety, Associated Press, Aug. 3, 2022 "Lara Logan, a former Fox Nation host, recently claimed that U.S. Border Patrol agents are distributing Social Security numbers to immigrants at the border. A video of her comments has circulated widely across social media platforms. In the clip, which was recorded during a Saturday event promoting election conspiracies in Tempe, Arizona, Logan tells the audience, “Now...

August 02, 2022

No Immigrants, No Chips

Brendan Bordelon, Eleanor Mueller, Politico, July 31, 2022 "[E]ven as Biden signs into law more than $52 billion in “incentives” designed to lure chipmakers to the U.S., an unusual alliance of industry lobbyists, hard-core China hawks and science advocates says the president’s dream lacks a key ingredient — a small yet critical core of high-skilled workers. It’s a politically troubling irony: To achieve the long...

August 01, 2022

Legal questions shroud Gov. Greg Abbott’s move to bus migrants back to the border

JAMES BARRAGÁN, URIEL J. GARCÍA, AUG. 1, 2022 "State and local law enforcement have long transferred custody of undocumented migrants to federal immigration authorities after they’ve been arrested. But previously it’s been the federal government’s job to pick them up. Abbott’s decision to arrest migrants and actively bring them back to the border, essentially forcing such a handoff, represents a broadening of the...

July 27, 2022

Expert: End Title 42 and Restore Order

Prof. Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, July 27, 2022 The Hill - Opinion:  Ending Title 42 won’t cause immigration mayhem — It will restore order "... Since March 2020, approximately  900,000 people  — including over 215,000 parents and children — have been denied the ability to request asylum at all. They’re casualties of Title 42, a pandemic-related policy that paused nearly all asylum proceedings at the border. Some...

July 26, 2022

Expert: Trump's Forced Separation of Families Violated Due Process

Jorge Cancino, Univision, July 26, 2022 "[T]he total number of separated families is not known and some 1,500 children (data updated in February) are still lost in a limbo that, in the opinion of experts, it is not known how it will be repaired. ... “The forced separation of families during the Trump administration violated the due process rights of families,” says Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration...