A crucial path to legal status for immigrant victims of crimes is the U visa, which Congress established with strong bipartisan support to protect victims of particular crimes who are helpful to law enforcement. Because the U visa was intended to encourage reporting of crimes, the application requires a certification form to be completed by a federal, state, or local authority that is investigating or prosecuting the alleged offense. Arbitrary...
Immigration Law
In 2005, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency enacted a policy sanctioning its civil ICE agents to use strategic deception, known as “ruses,” to facilitate community immigration enforcement operations. This policy provided agents a means to overcome the limitation that civil immigration arrest warrants are administrative as opposed to judicial in nature, which effectively precluded agents from entering a target’s home without...
Despite deportation’s devastating effects, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) specifies deportation as the penalty for nearly every immigration law violation. Critics have regularly decried the INA’s lack of proportionality, contending that the penalty often does not fit the offense. The immigration bureaucracy’s implementation of the INA, however, involves a spectrum of penalties short of deportation. Using tools such as administrative...
As immigration courts work through never-ending dockets and as detention centers operate beyond capacity, scholars and advocates have raised questions about the effects of pretrial immigration detention on outcomes for noncitizens. While pretrial detention is studied frequently in the criminal context, few empirical studies have addressed the consequences of pretrial immigration detention in particular. To help fill this gap in the literature,...
The categorical approach, which is a method federal courts use to ‘categorize’ which state law criminal convictions can trigger federal sanctions, is one of the most impactful yet misunderstood legal doctrines in criminal and immigration law. For thousands of criminal offenders, the categorical approach determines whether a previous state law conviction—as defined by the legal elements of the crime—sufficiently matches...
During the Trump Administration, disturbing images of immigration officials forcibly separating parents from their children at the U.S.–Mexico border have rightly invited an onslaught of criticism. Voices across the political spectrum have called these actions immoral and insisted that this is not who we are. The underlying moral imperative of this critique is correct, but this Essay argues that it rests on a mischaracterization of our immigration...
A new front in the war against sanctuary cities has emerged. Until recently, the fight against sanctuary cities has largely focused on the federal government’s efforts to defund states like California and cities like Chicago and New York for resisting federal immigration enforcement. Thus far, localities have mainly prevailed against this federal anti-sanctuary campaign, relying on federalism protections afforded by the Tenth Amendment’s anticommandeering...