June 10, 2020

Injustice and the Disappearance of Discretionary Detention under Trump: Detaining Low Risk Immigrants without Bond

Robert Koulish & Kate Evans, May 22, 2020 "This Report demonstrates that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violates legal requirements to provide immigrants with an individualized custody determination. Trump’s enforcement policies brought a surge of low-risk immigrants into ICE custody. The detention risk tool was supposed to train officers and strongly discourage them from detaining low-risk immigrants...

June 09, 2020

Using a Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut: Trump Proclamation Bans Chinese Students and Researchers Linked to China’s “Military-Civil Fusion Strategy”

Cyrus Mehta, June 1, 2020 "President Trump has issued a  proclamation  limiting Chinese students wishing to study in the United States to undergraduates under certain conditions, and limiting Chinese researchers. The proclamation states that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) uses some Chinese students, mostly post-graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, to operate as “non-traditional collectors of intellectual...

June 08, 2020

Migratory Notes 166 (June 4, 2020)

Migratory Notes 166, June 4, 2020 - DHS on the police line, vacation visa limbo, Somali youth join protests...and much, much more!

June 08, 2020

TRAC Sounds the Alarm: EOIR Stats "Too Unreliable to be Meaningful"

TRAC, June 3, 2020 " EOIR's Data Release on Asylum So Deficient Public Should Not Rely on Accuracy of Court Records TRAC has concluded that the data updated through April 2020 it has just received on asylum and other applications for relief to the Immigration Courts are too unreliable to be meaningful or to warrant publication. We are therefore discontinuing updating our popular  Immigration Court Asylum...

May 30, 2020

Expert: Trump Likely to Seek 'Political Cover' in OPT Controversy

Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, May 29, 2020 "Advocates for international students are raising alarm bells about a possible Trump administration plan to curtail a popular program that lets international students work in the U.S. for up to three years after graduating college. The advocates say restrictions on the program could have far-reaching economic implications for the American labor market and for colleges...

May 29, 2020

Migratory Notes 165 (May 28, 2020)

Migratory Notes 165 (May 28, 2020) - Border activists & bankers unite, Brazil ban, refugee docs ... and much, much more!

May 29, 2020

The Impact of COVID-19 on Noncitizens and Across the U.S. Immigration System

Jorge Loweree, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick and Walter Ewing, Ph.D., May 27, 2020 "The COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus) pandemic, and the federal government’s response, has disrupted virtually every aspect of the U.S. immigration system. Visa processing overseas by the Department of State, as well as the processing of some immigration benefits within the country by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), have...

May 28, 2020

Justice For Sale? DOJ Offered Buyouts to Pre-Trump BIA Members

Tanvi Misra, Roll Call, May 27, 2020 "The Justice Department offered buyouts to pre-Trump administration career members on its influential immigration appeals board as part of an ongoing effort to restructure the immigration court system with new hires who may be likely to render decisions restricting asylum. An internal memo viewed by CQ Roll Call shows that James McHenry, the director of the Executive Office...

May 25, 2020

When 'Dreamers' Self-Deport

The Take, May 22, 2020 "The US Supreme Court will soon decide the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme.  The federal programme has granted a temporary reprieve from deportation for undocumented young people, known as "Dreamers". The expected ruling will decide the fate of more than 700,000 people in the US.  In this episode, we bring you a story about two young Dreamers...

May 22, 2020

Re-Coding Asylum: Lawyers With Tech Battling For Migrant Justice

Forbes, May 21, 2020 "Over the last several years, America has been rocked by evidence of the mistreatment of migrants in detention centers. While the nation makes its political judgments about the future of immigration policy, Stephen Manning has assembled a team of lawyers, organizers, and tech innovators working to squeeze more humanity out of the current system while imagining its replacement. We talked to...

May 22, 2020

Migratory Notes 164 (May 21, 2020)

Migratory Notes 164 (May 21, 2020) - Express deporting kids, no asylum north or south, front-line Filipinos...and much, much more!

May 21, 2020

Immigrant Health-Care Workers in the United States

Jeanne Batalova, MPI, May 14, 2020 "Immigrants represent disproportionately high shares of U.S. workers in many essential occupations, including in health care—a fact underscored during the coronavirus pandemic as the foreign born have played a significant role in frontline pandemic-response sectors. In 2018, more than 2.6 million immigrants, including 314,000 refugees, were employed as health-care workers, with...

May 20, 2020

Experts: H-1B and COBRA

Shilpa Phadnis, TNN, May 20, 2020 " Cyrus D Mehta , managing attorney at the New York-based law firm Cyrus D Mehta & Partners, said if the employer offers health insurance, then under COBRA, the employer must offer the option of continuing coverage to individuals who lose their benefits due to termination of employment.  "Employer plans are generally of a higher quality, and employers are able to purchase...

May 20, 2020

Public Health Experts Urge CDC, HHS to Withdraw Order Enabling Mass Expulsion of Asylum Seekers

LETTER TO HHS SECRETARY AZAR AND CDC DIRECTOR REDFIELD SIGNED BY LEADERS OF PUBLIC HEALTH SCHOOLS, MEDICAL SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, AND OTHER U.S. INSTITUTIONS "We are public health experts at leading public health schools, medical schools, hospitals, and other institutions across the United States who are working at the forefront of the response to the novel coronavirus. We recognize that extraordinary circumstances...

May 20, 2020

100% of H-1B Employers Offer Average Market Wages—78% Offer More

David J. Bier, CATO, May 18, 2020 "The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released  a report  last week that purports to show that “H-1B employers undercut local wages.” Employers use  the H-1B program  to hire temporary foreign workers in specialty occupations. EPI writes, “By setting two of the four wage levels below the median—and thereby not requiring that firms pay market wages to H-1B workers—the DOL [Department...

May 18, 2020

Immigration Courts in Chaos

Tal Kopan, San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2020 "[M]any of those who work in the system say the Trump administration has handled the shutdown in an especially haphazard manner, increasing the stress on judges and attorneys in addition to immigrants and making it harder for the courts to bounce back.  “There isn’t a day that goes by that there isn’t mass chaos behind this veil of business as usual,” said Ashley...

May 18, 2020

USCIS Seeks Federal Bailout

Miriam Jordan, New York Times, May 17, 2020 "A precipitous drop in applications for green cards, citizenship and other programs has threatened the solvency of the federal agency that administers the country’s lawful immigration system, prompting it to seek a $1.2 billion cash infusion from Congress as well as fee hikes to stay afloat.  The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which relies on the...

May 18, 2020

The Out Crowd

This American Life, Nov. 15, 2019 "Reports from the frontlines of the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" asylum policy. We hear from asylum seekers waiting across the border in Mexico, in a makeshift refugee camp, and from the officers who sent them there to wait in the first place.  This episode won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting, the first ever given for audio journalism.&qu...

May 15, 2020

Lawsuit Filed Over 'Remain in Mexico' Program Secrecy

American Immigration Council, American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), Human Rights Watch (HRW), Winston & Strawn LLP, May 14, 2020 "The American Immigration Council, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the law firm Winston & Strawn LLP filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Northern District of California to compel the release of records about the U.S. Migrant...

May 15, 2020

At The Mercy Of The Courts

Max Siegelbaum, Mazin Sidahmed, DocumentedNY, Latino USA, May 13, 2020 "... In 2019, we set out to document the fallout from those changes, observing New York City’s immigration courts every single day for three months. When we began reporting this story, we knew the courts were struggling to keep up with the influx of cases and the pressure the Trump administration was putting on them. At the time, the administration...

May 15, 2020

Migratory Notes 163 (May 14, 2020)

Migratory Notes 163 (May 14, 2020) - 20,000+ expelled, Chinatown devastation, a coronavirus love story...and much, much more!

May 13, 2020

Did DHS Violate the Privacy Act?

Democracy Forward, May 11, 2020 "Democracy Forward Requests Investigation Into Whether Trump DHS Officials Violated Privacy Law by Leaking Individuals’ Immigration Status to Fox News, Breitbart Newly Released Emails Reveal Pattern of Disclosures to Advance an Anti-Immigration Narrative Today, Democracy Forward  asked  the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to investigate...

May 11, 2020

Small Acts of Thanks

Jeffrey S. Chase, May 8, 2020 "I would like to share a nice story (for once).  It illustrates how a postscript can sometimes prove far more meaningful than the main story. A friend and colleague in the DC area, Eileen Blessinger of Blessinger Legal, planned a series of training lectures via Zoom during the pandemic.  When I initially agreed to present one of the sessions on asylum law, I was told it would be...

May 11, 2020

Trump Is Using the Pandemic to Flout Immigration Laws

Lucas Guttentag and Stefano M. Bertozzi, May 11, 2020 "For more than a month, under the guise of fighting the coronavirus, the Trump administration has used the nation’s public health laws as a pretext for summarily deporting refugees and children at the border.   This new border policy runs roughshod over  legal rights ,  distracts  from meaningful measures to prevent spread of the coronavirus and undermines...

May 07, 2020

Migratory Notes 162 (May 7, 2020)

Migratory Notes 162 (May 7, 2020) - Essential illegal workers, American kids sue for aid, migration to Israel...and much, much more!