Antiracism & Social Justice Resources

But the link between the two issues is often ignored. Exclusionary immigration policies are unjust for many of the same reasons as is racial discrimination by the state. Both restrict freedom and o…

First lady Jill Biden and her staff will work with a task force and offer input on a project to help reunite immigrant families that have been separated at the border, according to CNN.Three s…

View on Westlaw or start a FREE TRIAL today, Judge blocks Trump administration's new restrictions on H-1B visas, Business Information & News

The ACLU's Lee Gelernt said he's often asked whether the Trump administration has helped reunite families. He said that rather than help, it has withheld data.

The issue On his first day in office, President Biden announced the highlights of a far-reaching plan to reform the U.S. immigration system. The anticipated bill is expected to feature a path to…

Sen. Amy Klobuchar and 13 colleagues asked the State Department what steps it is taking to support LGBTQ asylum-seekers.

The Texas attorney general filed a lawsuit on Friday that seeks to block U.S. President Joe Biden's move to pause certain deportations for 100 days, a controversial opening-move by the Democratic president that has provoked blowback from some Republicans.

Trump’s shift from demonizing immigrants to targeting leftists is straight out of the fascist playbook.

The White House Friday reversed course on refugee admissions, after an earlier announcement maintaining a controversial Trump-era refugee cap was met with disdain by Democrats and immigration activ…

New Measures Leverage Success of Venezuela Enforcement Initiative to Limit Disorderly and Unsafe Migration While the courts have prevented the Title 42 public health order from lifting for now, the Biden-Harris Administration today is announcing new enforcement measures to increase security at the border and reduce the number of individuals crossing unlawfully between ports of…

By Chair Cecilia Rouse, Lisa Barrow, Kevin Rinz, and Evan Soltas The United States is often described as a nation of immigrants. With the exception of Native Americans, the vast majority of Americans are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants or enslaved people. This diversity has been celebrated for its contributions to American culture through…

From a storefront law office in the US border city of El Paso, Texas, one man set out to tear down the great wall of indifference raised between the US and Mexico. Carlos Spector has filed hundreds of political asylum cases on behalf of human rights defenders, journalists, and political dissidents. Though his legal activism has only inched the process forward -- 98 percent of refugees from Mexico are still denied asylum -- his myriad legal cases and the resultant media fallout has increasingly put US immigration policy, the corrupt state of Mexico, and the political basis of immigration, asylum, and deportation decisions on the spot. We Built the Wall is an immersive, engrossing look at the new front in the immigration wars. It follows the gripping stories of people like Saul Reyes, forced to flee his home after a drug cartel murdered several members of his family, and Delmy Calderon, a forty-two-year-old woman leading an eight-woman hunger strike in an El Paso detention center. Truax tracks the heart-wrenching trials of refugees like Yamil, the husband and father who chose a prison cell over deportation to Mexico, and Rocio Hernandez, a nineteen-year-old who spent nearly her entire life in Texas and is now forced to live in a city where narcotraffickers operate with absolute impunity.

"This work explores the conflicts over migration at the center of the social, political, intellectual, and physical landscape of the early United States. Examining the voluntary and forced migrations of Indigenous, African American, and Anglo Americans in the decades immediately following the Revolution, Samantha Seeley argues that the United States took shape as a white republic through contentious negotiations over who could move and where, who could remain and how. Removal was not sweeping, top-down federal legislation. Instead, it was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed tribal leaders' attempts to expel white settlers from Native lands and African Americans' legal battles to remain within states that sought to drive them out. National in scope, the book is grounded in a close examination of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri--states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom where removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested"--

Immigration law is unique in its national security applications because, while it may be used as a mechanism for keeping the enemy out, it is also the apparatus for entry into the US. This book examines this topic by conducting a historical overview of using immigration law for national security purposes, and exploring laws and cases themselves.

They stole 15 years of my life. A native of Monterrey, Mexico, Ricardo Aldape Guerra was sentenced to death in 1982 for the first-degree murder of a Houston Police Officer. He spent 15 years in a maximum security prison in Huntsville, Texas, before his death sentence was overturned and he was set free. Ricardo Ampudia, explores the history and ethics of the death penalty in this fascinating look at its impact on Mexicans sentenced to death in the United States. A fervent opponent of capital punishment, Ampudia came to his beliefs because of his involvement in defending Aldape. The author offers a brief introduction about the death penalty, both in the U.S. and around the world. Most of the countries that apply the death penalty have dictatorial regimes or repressive governments, with the U.S. being the notable exception. Subsequent chapters focus on the death penalty in the U.S. and the work done by the Mexican government to protect its citizens abroad. The final chapters focus on the Ricardo Aldape Guerra case. In this section, it¿s revealed that the reopened investigation of the crime uncovered evidence that the jury never heard when Aldape was convicted. And in fact, a shocking pattern of police and prosecutorial intimidation, misconduct, and abuse came to light. Originally published in Mexico as Mexicanos al grito de muerte, this absorbing account of the history, use, and flaws of the death penalty is a must-read for anyone interested in the criminal justice system in the United States.

"Legal Passing offers a nuanced understanding of how undocumented Mexicans constantly negotiate the vexed conditions of their US receiving locales as shaped by a spectrum of federal, state, and local immigration measures. Leveraging differences between cities and states that accommodate immigrants and those that aim to drive them away, Garia shows that undocumented Mexicans in restrictive locations are not more likely to leave, but, instead, learn to pass as 'legal' by carefully choosing how to dress, where to travel, when to speak, and even what to name their children. Legal Passing combines social theory on race and immigration with place and law, using interviews, surveys, and ethnography to show the everyday failures and long-term human consequences of anti-immigrant legislation"--Provided by publisher.

This collection focuses broadly on the role of law in the construction of U.S. borders and takes up an important question raised by the global turn in American studies scholarship: once territory becomes less critical to scholarship in the discipline, what constitutes the frame of American studies? For this project, a "border" is not simply a territorial boundary. Borders are created through formal legal controls on entry and exit, through the construction of rights of citizenship and noncitizenship, and through the regulation of American power in other parts of the world. Where legal rights are at issue, borders and territory continue to play a powerful role, especially as certain spaces, such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are marked by the U.S. government as outside legal restraints on government power. Yet the law also extends the United States beyond its literal borders, through, for example, efforts to export democracy to the Middle East. This is the first collection to map the intersection of law and American studies, and it captures the excitement of interdisciplinary work at this intersection.

"A 1975 state-wide law in Texas made it legal for school districts to bar students from public schools if they were in the country illegally, thus making it extremely difficult or even possible for scores of children to receive an education. The resulting landmark Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe (1982), established the constitutional right of children to attend public elementary and secondary schools regardless of legal status and changed how the nation approached the conversation about immigration outside the law. Today, as the United States takes steps towards immigration policy reform, Americans are subjected to polarized debates on what the country should do with its "illegal" or "undocumented" population. In Immigration Outside the Law, acclaimed immigration law expert Hiroshi Motomura takes a neutral, legally-accurate approach in his attention and responses to the questions surrounding those whom he calls "unauthorized migrants." In a reasoned and careful discussion, he seeks to explain why unlawful immigration is such a contentious debate in the United States and to offer suggestions for what should be done about it. He looks at ways in which unauthorized immigrants are becoming part of American society and why it is critical to pave the way for this integration. In the final section of the book, Motomura focuses on practical and politically viable solutions to the problem in three public policy areas: international economic development, domestic economic policy, and educational policy. Amidst the extreme opinions voiced daily in the media, Motomura explains the complicated topic of immigration outside the law in an understandable and refreshingly objective way for students and scholars studying immigration law, policy-makers looking for informed opinions, and any American developing an opinion on this contentious issue"--

"The Immigration Act of 1965 was one of the most consequential laws ever passed in the United States and immigration policy continues to be one of the most contentious areas of American politics. As a 'nation of immigrants, ' the United States has a long and complex history of immigration programs and controls which are deeply connected to the shape of American society today. This volume makes sense of the political history and the social impacts of immigration law, showing how legislation has reflected both domestic concerns and wider foreign policy. [The author] examines how immigration law reforms have inspired radically different responses across all levels of government, from cooperation to outright disobedience, and how they continue to fracture broader political debates. [The author] concludes with an overview of how significant, on-going challenges in our interconnected world, including 'failed states' and climate change, will shape American migrations for many decades to come."--

A critical look at the mechanisms, beliefs, and ideologies that govern U.S. immigration laws, and the social impacts of their enforcement--Provided by publisher.

The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship-book

"At its most basic, "crimmigration" law describes the convergence of two distinct bodies of law: criminal law and procedure with immigration law and procedure. This book lays out crimmigration laws contours. It tracks the legal developments that have created crimmigration law and explains the many ways in which the stark line that once appeared to keep criminal law firmly divided from immi-gration law has melted away. In doing so, it highlights crimmigration laws most salient features-its ability to substantially raise the stakes of criminal prosecutions by dramati-cally expanding the list of crimes that can result in removal from the United States, its willingness to freely rely on crimes that apply only to migrants, and its vast dependence on detention as a means of policing immigration law"--

"This ethnography investigates immigration enforcement in New York City, following individual migrants, their lawyers, and the NGOs that serve them into the immigration courtrooms that decide their cases"--

"Citizenship as Foundation of Rights explores the nature and meaning of citizenship and the rights flowing from American citizens in the context of current debates around politics including immigration. The book explains the sources of citizenship rights in the Constitution and focuses on three key citizenship rights - the right to vote, the right to employment, and the right to travel in the US. It explains why those rights are fundamental and how national identification systems and ID requirements to vote, work and travel undermine the fundamental citizen rights. Richard Sobel analyzes how protecting citizens' rights preserves them for future generations of citizens and aspiring citizens here. No other book offers such a clarification of fundamental citizen rights and explains how ID schemes contradict and undermine the constitutional rights of American citizenship"--

"The Battle to Stay in America is the story of a community learning to defend itself from the U.S. federal government's crackdown on immigrants. Told through the eyes of a lawyer on the front line, the book offers an introduction to a broken legal system"--

"During the Trump administration, the immigration courts have been decried as more politicized enforcement weapon than impartial tribunal. Yet few people are aware of a fundamental flaw in the system that long pre-dates the current administration: The immigration courts are not really "courts" at all but an office of the Department of Justice-the nation's law enforcement agency. The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts uses narrative history, focusing on previously unstudied decisions in the Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush administrations, to help readers understand both the human tragedy of our immigration court system today and the human crises that led to its creation. Moving the reader from understanding to action, Alison Peck offers a lens through which to evaluate contemporary bills and proposals to reform our immigration court system. Peck provides an accessible legal analysis of recent events to make the case for independent immigration courts, proposing that the courts be moved from the Department of Justice into an independent, Article I court system. As long as the immigration courts remain under the authority of the attorney general, the administration of immigration justice will remain a game of political football-with people's very lives on the line"--

"Providing a radical new approach to labour migration, this book challenges the prevailing legal and political construction of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer, whilst at the same time reimagining this irregularity as the basis of an alternative, post-capitalist, sociality. The text draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and more specifically his term 'ecotechnics', in order to examine how economic, political and juridical norms deny the full legal status of certain people who are deemed to be irregular. This ostensible irregularity is revealed as a regular feature of labour market practice, and a necessary support for the conceptual foundations of capitalist legality. As this book shows, however, this legality - and with it, the technological subordination of life to the circulation of capital as if this were the only possibility for our being in the world - is not insurmountable. The book's consideration of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer comes to provide an alternative basis for reimagining our relationship not only to migration and to labour itself, but ultimately to each other. This powerful analysis of contemporary labour migration is of considerable interest to legal and political theorists, philosophers, labour lawyers, migration experts, and others with theoretical, political or policy interests in this area. Anastasia Tataryn is an Assistant Professor at St. Jerome's University of Waterloo, Canada"--

Thinking creatively about the American immigration system. In this new and exciting series of short Immigration Sounds Bites, Immigration Attorney and podcaster, Jacob Sapochnick, takes the audience on a daily journey of discovery about Immigration in America. You ask, we answer, Simple. All your Immigration Questions, from our Facebook Page, Blog and Emails. Listen in on this no-holds-barred look at the current state of our Immigration system, we share stories of inspiring Immigrants, highlight news and current events, and always answer your questions. Would love to hear from you, email jacob@h1b.biz with any suggestions for the show.

American immigration law, to help our listeners work beyond borders, live beyond borders, and love beyond borders. Find us at www.jamiegortonlaw.com

A podcast for the discussion of immigration law and policy. Each episode features 2-3 lawyers, academics, politicians, and stakeholders discussing current migration issues.