Tag Archives: Immigration

A Positive Immigration Agenda for Racial Justice

Jul 7, 2021 Angela BanksImmigrationAdd a Comment

Since the summer of 2020, Americans have been having more explicit discussions about racial hierarchy in the United States and the role of law enforcement in maintaining such hierarchy. Kevin Johnson’s forthcoming essay, Bringing Racial Justice to Immigration Law, brings that conversation to immigration law. Johnson argues that Congress, but ultimately the Supreme Court, needs to explicitly address the racial animus that has motivated the structure of immigration law in the United States. Through an examination of immigration history, the emergence of a robust immigrant rights movement, and the significant backlash from the Trump Administration, Johnson demonstrates that a positive agenda for immigration reform is required in order for the country to move towards a more just immigration system, rather than simply reverting to the pre-Trump immigration system, which was not a model for justice.

Johnson’s essay begins by mapping the racially discriminatory foundations of immigration law and the minimal role that courts have played in acknowledging and remedying such discrimination. The essay then discusses the emergence of the robust immigrant rights movement despite the fact that non-citizens are not eligible to vote. A response to the growth of the immigrant rights movement was a backlash by the Trump Administration. The next section of the essay explores the efforts undertaken by the Trump Administration to “maintain and reinforce the racial caste quality of the immigration system.” (P. 3.) The essay ends with an appreciation for the immigrant rights movement, and the claim that the goals sought by the movement will only be “meaningful, lasting, and truly transformative” if the Supreme Court jurisprudence shifts to require robust constitutional review of immigration laws and “allows the courts to serve as a check on racial animus.” (P. 3.)

Bringing Racial Justice to Immigration Law is a timely and important piece because it draws attention to the role of racial animus in the structure of U.S. immigration law. Scholars often recount the xenophobic concerns that have motivated the country’s immigration law, but it is rarely referred to as feature of the system. Rather it is examined as a bug. Johnson’s piece requires readers to rethink that analysis.

Acknowledging the structural challenges within U.S. immigration law leads Johnson to highlight two important features of a positive immigrant rights agenda. The first is legislative reform because at present it is “likely the only way to attempt to bring greater racial justice for immigrants.” (P. 11.) Congress could enact the DREAM Act, comprehensive immigration reform, and reform the immigration bureaucracy. These would bring about important changes that would positively impact the lives of millions of individuals. However, Johnson explains that these types of reforms will be vulnerable to the goals and perspectives of the next political majority because courts exercise such minimal review of substantive immigration law.

Therefore the second claim is that the Supreme Court must require “constitutional review of the immigration laws and allow[] the courts to serve as a check on racial animus.” (P. 3.) As Johnson details in his essay, the Supreme Court established an extremely deferential standard of review for immigration cases in the 1800s that limits the courts from reviewing substantive challenges to immigration laws, particularly in the area of Equal Protection challenges. Therefore the political branches can, and have, enacted immigration restrictions rooted in racial animus and the courts have failed to acknowledge the racial animus or strike down the laws or policies. As Johnson explains, “[t]he immigration laws’ immunity from constitutional review encourage Congress to act on its worst instincts and prevent a dialogue between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches about the constitutional constraints on immigration law and policy.” (Pp. 12-13.) Meaningful change within immigration law will require substantive changes to the law, but also significant changes in the role of the courts as a check on the political branches.

As Congress considers the various immigration bills before it, it is important to remember that “[w]ithout constitutional constraints, the nation can expect repeated episodes of anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by racial animus, with the Trump presidency simply making the most recent and extreme one.” (P. 13.)

Rescue Based in Liberty and Dignity

Nov 11, 2020 Jill FamilyImmigrationAdd a Comment

The Law of Rescue connects aiding migrants to the body of law governing rescue generally. Professor Shalini Bhargava Ray proposes a new theoretical framework for the law of rescue based on her examination of prosecutions for migrant rescue. Her framework de-emphasizes economic interests and lifts up considerations of liberty and dignity.

While “[t]he law of rescue was not designed to express, promote, or protect the human dignity of beneficiaries or the liberty of rescuers,” (P. 623) Professor Ray argues that it should be redesigned to do so. Her new framework would balance three considerations: (1) the rescuer’s liberty to engage in the rescue; (2) the beneficiary’s need for rescue; and (3) the potential third-party harm flowing from a consensual rescue.

The law of rescue cuts across many substantive areas of law. Professor Ray identifies tort law, contract law, criminal law, public international law and maritime law, in addition to immigration law, as providing standards for rescue. Professor Ray examines how these substantive areas treat rescue in various circumstances and the historical motivations behind those rules. She is particularly interested in how the law of rescue treats both the person needing rescue and the (potential) rescuer.

Professor Ray finds that the law surrounding rescue mostly has developed around economic interests and commercial development. Existing theoretical frameworks are anchored in and dominated by the concerns of economic elites: economic efficiency and property rights. It is a mistake, according to Professor Ray, to ignore dignity interests of the rescued and liberty interests of rescuers. Because these considerations are not prominent, “the law of rescue leaves vast areas of important rescue work exposed to prosecution.” (P. 623.)

Migrant rescue, for example, can be subject to prosecution. Federal law prohibits transporting or smuggling an individual but also includes a prohibition on harboring. Harboring includes inducing or encouraging an authorized individual to remain in the United States. Some courts have interpreted the prohibition on inducing or encouraging to include any kind of assistance, including free housing and food.

The government does prosecute under the harboring laws. Professor Ray details the 2018 arrest and trial of Scott Warren. Mr. Warren was charged with harboring counts after he provided food, water, and shelter to two migrants in Arizona. While Mr. Warren was acquitted of the harboring charge, his arrest and trial serves as a powerful example of what is at stake for rescuers when rescue is illegal.

Applying her new framework to the rescue of migrants, Professor Ray concludes that prohibiting rescue in this context degrades both liberty and dignity. If the law protects the right not to rescue, as it does in torts, then it should equally promote the interests of those who want to rescue.

To Professor Ray, the rescuer’s liberty interest in rescuing connects to the freedom of association, both as a constitutional norm and a moral value. Professor Ray argues that this liberty interest is strongest when a rescuer seeks to prevent death, as is frequently the case in aiding individuals who recently crossed the US border illegally. The liberty interest is strongest in this situation because the individual already has crossed the border (the rescuer is not leading the border crossing) and the rescuer is not affecting the ultimate decision whether the individual will be able to remain legally in the United States. Instead, the rescuer is promoting another human’s life and welfare while satisfying the rescuers own moral values. In such a scenario, the beneficiary’s dignity risks are high, as survival is at stake. As Professor Ray states, “[p]ermitting those migrants who do cross the border to survive the journey is the least the law can do.” (P. 658.) Consideration of the risk of third-party harm incorporates externalities. This risk is low, and, in any case, outweighed when the migrant’s life is at stake. Professor Ray considers externalities such as littering, trespassing on private land, damage to private land, property crimes, personal crimes, and the protection of sovereignty.

Professor Ray’s article is an important contribution to a growing trend to link immigration law to other areas of law. Traditionally immigration law has been seen as an outlier and is often left out of conversations about mainstream legal developments. This has been changing somewhat in administrative law and constitutional law. The Law of Rescue builds another immigration law bridge.

The Law of Rescue also is an important contribution because it identifies and highlights the importance of dignity interests in the law. Dignity interests often are overshadowed by economic interests, but Professor Ray reminds us that they are just as important. In Professor Ray’s new theoretical framework, dignity is a factor among three to be considered. In some ways, her proposal is in fact quite modest; one might argue that dignity should be the overriding consideration. Her proposal seems revolutionary, however, because dignity as a concept is waning in immigration law. Reimagining the law of rescue is a good place to start to inject dignity back into how the law treats migrants.

Resistance is Not As Useless As We Believed

Jun 12, 2020 Juliet StumpfImmigration4 comments

“Resistance is useless,” said the Vogon guard to Ford and Arthur, the intergalactic protagonists of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That statement turned out to be pretty accurate. Despite Ford’s attempt at resistance through searing critique of the bureaucratic system that the Vogon guard serves, he and Arthur are summarily pushed through the airlock into the starry void.¹

Perhaps what Ford needed was the lesson in Daniel Farbman’s Resistance Lawyering:  that resistance staged from within an unjust and illegitimate system, rather than from the outside, can be dramatically effective. Farbman illustrates this through examining resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the sharp edge of a system that shaped both the racial trajectory of this nation and our national yardstick of the meaning of injustice.

Resistance Lawyering introduces to the historical stage a troupe of unknowns: abolitionist lawyers who used the stingy, slanted procedural rules of the Fugitive Slave Act, in combination with political savvy, to “wage a proxy war against the institution of slavery.” Walking the halls of Congress or bringing impact litigation to defeat slavery, approaches that attack the institution from the outside, was not their methodology. Instead, they were direct service lawyers, employing the summary processes of the Act in service of their clients’ freedom and also their abolitionist commitment. These lawyers’ movement politics manifested in a commitment to ensuring that their clients remained free by engaging with and using the system the lawyers opposed.

Celebrating success in these cases would have been in tension with the idea that had significant traction for abolitionists: that the Fugitive Slave Act imposed relentless unremitting injustice on people who had succeeded in fleeing slavery. The historical consensus has embraced that narrative, concluding that the overwhelming majority of people were returned to slavery.  Farbman’s groundbreaking archival research, however, reveals that this direct service, linked with an unwavering commitment to opposing enslavement, was far more effective than previously realized. The article reports that “of 210 cases invoking some form of process under the Law, eighty-one (38.5 percent) of the fugitives ended their cases as free people,” either exonerated, escaped, or having had their freedom purchased.

I like this article (lots) because, in addition to the revelations that archival research brings, and to the light the article sheds on one of the most harrowing decades in this nation’s history, it’s a good read. Farbman introduces us to characters who once drew breath here, at the most important crossroads of their lives–people like Lewis, captured by a slavecatcher, who obtained representation by two abolitionist lawyers: John Joliffe and future president Rutherford B. Hayes. While his lawyers engaged with the Fugitive Slave Act commissioner, Lewis seized an opportunity not contemplated by the Act:

“While the room (including the lawyers on both sides) was thus distracted, Lewis slipped his chair back a little bit to make space for himself. Noticing that nobody took note of him moving his chair, he did it again until he was behind the marshal and almost in among the crowd. Still no one noticed his movements, so he quietly stood up and stepped backwards. An ally in the crowd gave him a nudge of encouragement and someone put a hat on his head. Then, while [Commissioner] Carpenter droned on, Lewis quietly walked right out of the courtroom and mingled among the crowd of free black activists who had gathered to observe the hearing.”

Lewis made it to a safe house and ultimately to Canada and freedom.

The article dubs this approach of working within the system in furtherance of its destruction “resistance lawyering.” Abolitionist lawyers were able to both protect their individual clients and use those cases to further political opposition to slavery. Resistance lawyering worked when the lawyers won, either by overcoming the procedurally-skewed odds and convincing an often-sympathetic judge on the merits, or by delaying the process sufficiently so that the client took the opportunity to escape or abolitionist groups staged a rescue. Even when lawyer lost though, the legalized violence of the return of a client to enslavement, and the inflicted horrors of legalized retaliation, laid before the public, furthered the abolitionist crusade against the law. This tactic of delay and transparency frustrated the summary process in the Fugitive Slave Act that was intended to facilitate rapid return of people who had made it to the North, with as little publicity as possible.

So what does this have to do with immigration? (After all, I’m an immigration editor for JOTWELL.) The article singles out immigration law as one area in which resistance lawyering has taken root. The United States has over the past few decades constructed a grand apparatus of immigration enforcement that many advocates believe encroaches on once sacrosanct principles of immigration law, like asylum law and family unity. The development of these institutions—what Eisha Jain has called the enforcement pyramid—results in mass deportation and detention but also play out among legal, social, and racial lines when enforcement manifests as surveillance and social control of communities of color. Arrest, deportation and detention rates have soared as have rates of conviction for immigration crimes. Procedural shortcuts to expelling noncitizens using administrative forms of deportation now leapfrog court proceedings as easily as turnstile jumping.

The lesson that Resistance Lawyering brings to the present is that daily direct advocacy linked to movement ideology has been effective in resisting institutionalized injustice. The article points to immigration law as one of several areas where resistance lawyering has either taken root or could. Stephen Manning and I have written before about massive collaborative resistance to family detention. That resistance effort relies on the accumulation of daily direct service actions yoked to the larger goal of frustrating, opposing, and ending family detention itself. Ingrid Eagly, Steven Shafer, and Janna Whalley have documented the role that immigration courts (and advocates) have played in reducing deportation and detention by reversing half of the negative credible fear decisions of asylum officers and systematically lowering the bond amount set by detention officers.

For observers of legal transformation, Resistance Lawyering holds another lesson. As commentators, scholars, and analysts, we often train our binoculars on impact litigation making waves in the Supreme Court, track the freefall of comprehensive immigration reform, or obsess over high-level agency policy and pronouncements. Resistance Lawyering teaches us that when we overlook the integration of direct service with political goalposts, we may be missing the game.

Long-Term Residence as Evidence of De Facto Membership

May 21, 2020 Angela BanksImmigrationAdd a Comment

In 2018 the Pew Research Center reported that approximately two-thirds of all unauthorized migrant adults in the United States have lived here for more than ten years. The average length of residence is fifteen years. The unauthorized migrant population has become a more settled population rather than a temporary population and mass deportation is politically impossible. In light of these realities it is critically important to seriously explore a pathway to lawful immigration status and/or citizenship for this population. Wadhia’s recent article in the Notre Dame Journal of Legislation argues that long-term residence should be a basis for access to regularizing immigration status in the United States. This argument is rooted in the historical use of long-term residence as the basis for a variety of forms of relief in immigration law.

Americans in Waiting: Finding Solutions for Long Term Residents offers a detailed overview of the role that long-term residence has played in the past, the role that it currently plays, and the role that it could play to address the immigration status of the almost 11 million unauthorized migrants in the United States. Long-term residence in the United States has been recognized as a mitigating factor in deportation cases since 1891 when Congress authorized the deportation of individuals who became a public charge within one year of arrival. The one-year statute of limitations was later extended to five years and this approach to deportation grounds was continued in 1917 when crime-based deportation grounds were adopted.

As historian Mae Ngai notes in the classic text Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and The Making of Modern America “it seemed unconscionable to expel immigrants after they had settled in the country and had begun to assimilate.” ²

As Wadhia explains with the words of Ngai, “they settle, raise families and acquire property–in other words, they become part of the nation’s economic and social fabric.” (P. 30.) Thus, deportation was not appropriate for long-term residents regardless of their immigration status or their actions within the country.

Wadhia’s article provides an incredibly useful overview of the various legal tools that have been used historically, and today, to provide relief to long-term resident non-citizens. The article begins with registry and ends with an order of supervision. Each tool offers a different type of relief, but each is available based on the non-citizens’ long-term residence in the United States. The additional tools addressed are the pathway to citizenship created in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, suspension of deportation, cancellation of removal, the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, temporary protected status, general deferred action, and the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. These tools vary in whether or not the recipients obtain lawful permanent residence status, permission to reside in the United States temporarily, or a promise not to deport for a specified period of time along with work authorization.

The political challenges which the United States of America is currently facing regarding the fate of approximately 11 million unauthorized migrants are not new. Long-term residence has historically been a basis for viewing individuals as members of our national community and providing a pathway to lawful immigration status. The American polity recognized presence and the resulting connections as paths to membership. Even though this approach to membership has not been applied equally to all immigrant groups, it is a principle that has been operationalized in our legal system. The political reality is that almost 11 million individuals are not going to be deported from the United States en masse. Therefore, it is important to discuss options for recognizing the de facto membership of this established population rather than allowing them to languish with uncertainty, limited employment options, and limited opportunities for social and political engagement. This article and Wadhia’s important book, Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump (2019), provide important insights on the role and use of discretion in responding to this challenge. Ultimately a legislative response is necessary to provide unauthorized migrants with durable solutions, but Wadhia outlines a wide range of statutory options that demonstrate that long-term residence is a compelling basis for providing a durable solution.

Watch This Space: AI at the Border

Mar 20, 2020 Jaya Ramji-NogalesImmigration1 comment

As scholars of immigration law have been busy digesting the firehose of law and policy changes shooting out of the Trump administration, the use of new technologies at the border has been proliferating. Petra Molnar’s new article, Technology on the margins: AI and Global Migration Management from a Human Rights Perspective, reminds us that we must begin to pay closer attention to these developments and how they are deployed and regulated. Building on her excellent report, Bots at the Gate, the article provides a timely and useful roadmap of the relevant technologies and their very real risks. Though in the end Molnar is more sanguine than I about the potential of human rights law to mediate these risks, she rings a crucially important warning bell that we would all do well to keep an ear out for over the roar of the firehose.

The article begins, as it should, with a basic description of the “class of technologies that assist or replace the judgment of human decision-makers.” Automated decision-making has the potential to impact adjudication processes and outcomes by the full range of immigration actors, from border patrol to immigration courts. But what technologies are contained within this category? Molnar lists four: artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated decision systems, and predictive analytics, describing them as technologies that can be taught and can learn. Along with the description, she raises the key concern about the opacity of how exactly these decisions are made. As Frank Pasquale and others have asked, what is in that algorithm? Bias, perhaps? Molnar makes the important connection between the literature that critically examines automated decision-making and immigration adjudication. She notes that these technologies present the same risks as human decision-makers: accountability, bias, discrimination, error, and transparency, reminding us not to be fooled by the algorithm’s veneer of scientific objectivity.

From this definition, the article identifies four key areas of concern around the use of technologies in migration governance, offering a foundational map that calls for future researchers to engage. The first concern Molnar raises is the privacy breaches arising from data collection, ranging from the monitoring of mobile phone records to analysis of social media to geotagging. She next examines concerns around biometrics and consent in conditions of unequal bargaining power, offering the disturbing example of refugees in Jordan who were required to submit to iris scanning in order to receive their weekly food rations. Third, Molnar describes the use of technology in surveillance, explaining that the militarization of the border through the use of drones, robots, and remote sensors as border control pushes migrants to more dangerous routes that are more likely to lead to death and serious injury. Finally, the article explores automated decision-making, discussing ICE’s bail determination algorithm and “Extreme Vetting Initiative.” Each of these topics is crying out (loud enough to be heard over the firehose) for future research by Molnar and others.

The article concludes with an explanation of why these developments are particularly concerning in the migration management arena. The pace of technological innovation combined with the dearth of transnational regulatory frameworks present a potent recipe for abuse when baked into migration’s “discretionary space of opaque decision-making.” Molnar explicitly links these concerns with the use of migration management as an experimental forum with the use of data collection and tracking by genocidal regimes in Germany and Rwanda. She explains that there are no legally binding international agreements governing the ethical use of AI in migration management; the existing piecemeal guidelines and task forces are insufficient to face the task at hand. In particular, Molnar notes the need for specificity in legal standards to regulate AI in the migration space.

She suggests a human rights framework as a potential solution. Though less optimistic about this proposal given human rights law’s limited protections for administrative decision-making as well as its lack of specificity, I am indebted to Molnar for pushing forward the conversation and certainly agree that “a more rigorous global accountability framework is now paramount.” An alternative route might be to pressure big technology companies with specific standards set by an independent body, but the most important next step is to dive into the project that Molnar has laid out for immigration scholars. As she aptly notes, “the complexity of human migration is not easily reducible to an algorithm.” Those of us with the relevant substantive knowledge must now turn our attention to figuring out how to harness the potential firehose of these new technologies for the benefit of humans on the move, in all of their brilliant complexity.