Executive Branch
House Limits Administrative Action Instead of Acting on Immigration Reform
Work on existing bills that lay out legislative options to fix the nation’s immigration system is languishing in the House while its members focus on legislation that rolls back the president’s power to help immigrants caught in the broken system. Following up on Wednesday’s vote to approve the… Read More
Local Anti-Immigrant Laws Die as More States and Municipalities Pursue Pro-Immigrant Policies
The Supreme Court announced this week that it would not review the appeals of lower-court decisions finding that local anti-immigrant ordinances passed by Farmers Branch, Texas and Hazleton, Pennsylvania were unconstitutional infringements on federal immigration law. The laws would have required private landlords to verify the immigration status… Read More
Recent Report on Deportation Misses the Big Picture
The Obama administration has deported nearly 2 million people so far, and it still has two years left to go. This would seem to indicate that the U.S. immigration enforcement machine is running at top speed. However, a report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC)—as well… Read More
What the DACA Renewal Process Should Look Like
According to the latest government statistics, over half a million DREAMers have received two-year deportation reprieves under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The first wave of these DACA recipients carry work authorization cards that are set to expire in the summer and… Read More
The Washington Post Exposes Sorry State of Immigration Courts
This week, the Washington Post ran a front page article drawing attention to the fact that our nation’s immigration courts are operating in crisis mode. The immigration courts are so overcrowded that judges are forced to make split-second decisions regarding complex legal issues, calling into question whether the court system is fairly administering justice. The article featured a morning in the life of one immigration judge who had 26 cases to hear before lunchtime. That equates to an average of just seven minutes per case. Given the high stakes involved in deportation cases—which can range from permanent separation from family in the United States to being returned to a country where a person fears for his or her life—a system that is overburdened and under-resourced is simply unacceptable. Read More
SOTU Shows Parties Moving Closer on Immigration Reform
During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Obama made it clear that improved immigration policies go hand-in-hand with the economic recovery, and nudged the House of Representatives to make the next move on immigration reform. Read More
Why Is There a Disparity in DACA Application Rates Among Different Nationalities?
A year and a half in, nationals from nearly every country have applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), President Obama’s deportation reprieve program for certain undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children. Despite this diverse participation, nationals of some countries are dramatically underrepresented… Read More
New Study Highlights Causes of Return Migration to Mexico
Mexicans and Americans Thinking Together (MATT) has presented the results of a new study that highlights some recent, significant shifts in return migration from the United States to Mexico. One of the merits of this study is that it reminds us of the dynamic and bi-directional nature of migratory flows between the two countries. Between 2005 and 2010, 1.39 million people moved from the U.S. to Mexico, of whom 985,000 were returning migrants. Interestingly, deportations (which, as we know, have escalated tremendously during the Obama administration) represent only 11% of all return migrants to Mexico in that period. This means that a significant number of return migrants “chose” to go back to Mexico voluntarily. Read More
Top Five Immigration Stories from 2013
From the beginning, it was clear that 2013 was going to be a big year for immigration. The results of the 2012 Presidential Election were widely interpreted as a rebuke to Mitt Romney’s enforcement-only “self-deportation” policy, and President Obama’s huge victory among minority communities was seen as a… Read More
New Year, New Leadership and New Opportunities at DHS
The Department of Homeland Security enters 2014 with new leadership, following the confirmation this month of Jeh Johnson and Alejandro Mayorkas for Secretary and Deputy Secretary, respectively. Johnson and Mayorkas bring years of government service to their new jobs. Mayorkas’ tenure as Director of USCIS led to a far more open agency that treated the public as a partner, with innovations such as public comment on policy memos, expanded public engagement opportunities, the entrepreneur-in-residence program, and the delivery of a working program to process DACA applications within two months of the president’s announcement of the program. These successes, coupled with Johnson’s experience as the top Pentagon lawyer, promise a new direction for DHS. Read More
All gifts are matched dollar for dollar
No one should face the immigration system alone
