(Im)migration Movements & the Law

By ending the DACA program, Trump is awakening the same nationwide movement that won the protections for young immigrants in the first place.

Participants in the Obama-era program shielding undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation are challenging the Trump administration's latest effort to limit the program, the first targeted challenge against the full set of new rules.

Interviews with law students and lawyers with DACA lend insight into policy prescriptions that can support them as they pursue their careers.

Being a Dreamer is.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics and lifestyle.

The ruling means immigrants protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will have to pay up to three times what they've been paying to enroll in classes starting in summer.

The Santa Fe Dreamers Project is trying to find stable housing for trans asylum-seekers like Susana Coreas, who have been stuck in Mexico for over a year.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told lawmakers Thursday he stands by the Trump administration decision to limit the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program following the Supreme Court's decision in June.

The Trump administration has revived a border security policy that legal experts say paves the way for mass deportations — without even a court hearing — and threatens to put Latino Arizonans, regardless of their citizenship status, at risk of racial profiling and removal from the country.  On Friday, the White House officially reinstated a […]

John Fetterman, whose wife was famously undocumented, now pushing to deport people like her

Legal experts and researchers say incoming President Donald Trump's promised mass deportations could actually end up undermining goals of public safety and national security.

The Homeland Security Department has scrapped a Biden policy that kept immigration authorities away from sensitive community places.

Securing America's Borders

As hundreds of new miles of border wall system have been constructed, they have pushed cartels to traffic their poisonous products precisely where DHS is best equipped— our Ports of Entry. The drugs we are seizing as a result of this new wall that never enter and devastate our communities, and never line the pockets of cartels.

The Border Patrol Tactical Unit provides an immediateresponse capability to emergent and high-risk incidents requiring specialized skills and tactics. BORTAC has a cadre of full-time team members headquartered in El Paso, Texas and non-full-time members dispersed throughout the United States. The teams can be called upon to deploy immediately when needed.

Use this form to request that we consider granting or renewing deferred action on a case-by-case basis using guidelines described in the final rule.

Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad F. Wolf announced that in response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the Department of Homeland Security will take action to thoughtfully consider the future of the DACA policy, including whether to fully rescind the program.

ALERT: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Final Rule Effective Oct. 31, 2022.

PHOENIX — Attorney General Kris Mayes announced today that she is joining a multistate federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional order attempting to unilaterally strip citizenship from citizens across the United States, including thousands of babies born in Arizona each year.

As debate about immigration policy rages from small towns to state capitals, from coffee shops to Congress, would-be immigrants are dying in the desert along the US-Mexico border. Beginning in the 1990s, the US government effectively sealed off the most common border crossing routes. This had the unintended effect of forcing desperate people to seek new paths across open desert. At least 4,000 of them died between 1995 and 2009. While some Americans thought the dead had gotten what they deserved, other Americans organized humanitarian aid groups. A Common Humanity examines some of the most active aid organizations in Tucson, Arizona, which has become a hotbed of advocacy on behalf of undocumented immigrants. This is the first book to examine immigrant aid groups from the inside. Author Lane Van Ham spent more than three years observing the groups and many hours in discussions and interviews. He is particularly interested in how immigrant advocates both uphold the legitimacy of the United States and maintain a broader view of its social responsibilities. By advocating for immigrants regardless of their documentation status, he suggests, advocates navigate the conflicting pulls of their own nation-state citizenship and broader obligations to their neighbors in a globalizing world. And although the advocacy organizations are not overtly religious, Van Ham finds that they do employ religious symbolism as part of their public rhetoric, arguing that immigrants are entitled to humane treatment based on universal human values. Beautifully written and immensely engaging, A Common Humanity adds a valuable human dimension to the immigration debate.

"Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide an inside account with never-before-told stories of the defining issue of Donald Trump's presidency: his steadfast opposition to immigration to the US. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take readers inside the White House to document how Trump and his allies blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump's anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled, and fought their way toward major immigration changes that have further polarized the nation. This definitive, behind-the-scenes account is filled with previously unreported stories that reveal how Trump's decision-making is driven by gut instinct and marked by disorganization, paranoia, and a constantly feuding staff"--

Because of restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas, trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last five years alone, over 60,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have stripped borders of their potential--as lines of contact, catalyst, and blend--turning our thresholds into barricades. Brilliant and provocative, The Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration's economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national identities. This book grounds its argument in the experiences and thinking of those on the frontlines of the crisis, spanning the world to do so. In each chapter, John Washington profiles a character impacted by borders. He adds to those portraits provocative analyses of the economics and ethics of bordering, concluding that if we are to seek justice or sustainability we must fight for open borders. In recent years, important thinkers have begun to urge a different approach to migration, but no book has made the argument as accessible or as compelling. Washington's case shines with the voices of people on the move, a portrait of what a world with open borders will give to our common future.

A damning portrait of the U.S.-Mexico border, where militaristic fantasies are unleashed, violent technologies are tested, and immigrants are targeted. Over the past three decades, U.S. immigration and border security policies have turned the southern states into conflict zones, spawned a network of immigrant detention centers, and unleashed an army of ICE agents into cities across the country. As award-winning journalist John Carlos Frey reveals in this groundbreaking book, the war against immigrants has been escalating for decades, fueled by defense contractors and lobbyists seeking profits and politicians--Republicans and Democrats alike--who relied on racist fear-mongering to turn out votes. After 9/11, while Americans' attention was trained on the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the War on Terror was ramping up on our own soil--aimed not at terrorists but at economic migrants, refugees, and families from South and Central America seeking jobs, safety, and freedom in the U.S. But we are no safer. Instead, families are being ripped apart, undocumented people are living in fear, and thousands of migrants have died in detention or crossing the border. Taking readers to the Border Patrol outposts, unmarked graves, detention centers, and halls of power, Sand and Blood is a frightening, essential story we must not ignore.

The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.

"An anthology of writing by Mexican journalists, historians, novelists, and artists on the immigration crisis in the United States"--;Despite the extensive coverage in the U.S. media of the southern border and Donald Trump's proposed wall, most English speakers have had little access to the multitude of perspectives from Mexico on the ongoing crisis. Boullosa and Quintero redress this imbalance with this collection of essays, translated into English for the first time, drawing on writing by journalists, novelists, and documentary-makers who are Mexican or based in Mexico. They discuss important questions, including the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, and questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and borders. -- adapted from jacket

"Fencing in Democracy is an ethnography examining groups that are usually left out of national discussions about the border wall: the communities living right on the border. Drawing on extensive primary research, the authors argue that a variety of factors, including media narratives, complex political maneuvering, and purposefully marginalizing discourse, have placed border communities in a state of necrocitizenship - a set of citizenship practices produced in response to exclusionary regimes that emphasize death. Throughout the book they show necrocitizenship as operating on three levels; the increasing militarization of border regions, the building of walls along international boundaries, and the privileging of the patriotic subject, one who is willing to die for one's country"--

"The twenty-first century has been an era of hardening borders--increased borderland patrols, surveillance and militarization are widening the chasm between those who can vacation (or do business) where they please, and others whose movements are restricted by armed guards. But as journalist Todd Miller finds in Empire of Borders, the US border is also becoming increasingly fluid, expanding thousands of miles outside of US territory often to protect Washington's interests. In places like Argentina, Kosovo, Honduras, Jordan and Afghanistan, US border patrol works alongside local agents to block migrants, terrorists, drug runners and smugglers from ever approaching the US. Empire of Borders traces the rise of this border regime, along with practices of "extreme vetting" and the vast global industry for border and homeland security. But in visiting the Jordan/Syria border, as well as Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico and the Philippines, Miller finds instead a global war against the poor"--

The border region of the Sonoran Desert, which spans southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora, Mexico, has attracted national and international attention. But what is less discussed in national discourses is the impact of current border policies on the Native peoples of the region. There are twenty-six tribal nations recognized by the U.S. federal government in the southern border region and approximately eight groups of Indigenous peoples in the United States with historical ties to Mexico--the Yaqui, the O'odham, the Cocopah, the Kumeyaay, the Pai, the Apaches, the Tiwa (Tigua), and the Kickapoo. Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there--whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counterdiscourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public. Through ethnographic research with grassroots Indigenous activists in the region, the author reveals several layers of division--the division of Indigenous peoples by the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the divisions that exist between Indigenous perspectives and mainstream U.S. perspectives regarding the border, and the traditionalist/nontraditionalist split among Indigenous nations within the United States. Divided Peoples asks us to consider the possibilities for challenging settler colonialism both in sociopolitical movements and in scholarship about Indigenous peoples and lands.

"In personal stories from twenty years of activism and reporting, an award-winning journalist calls on readers to imagine a world without borders. Every year an untold number of people perish attempting to cross the border into the United States. Thousands of families who do make it across are apprehended and separated, often with children languishing in cages. In light of the harm it unleashes, does our increasingly militarized border policy make anyone more secure? To answer that question, Todd Miller draws upon over twenty years of work investigating international borders. In a series of anecdotes, he relates his encounters with U.S. Border Patrol agents, deportees, migrants, human-rights activists, and scholars, taking readers on a journey from the deserts of the Southwest, to the mountains of Chiapas and Guatemala, and to border zones across the globe. Through the lens of his stories and personal reflections, Miller tackles big questions in clear and inviting prose, encouraging us to honestly reckon with our own beliefs about how best to meet the critical challenges of a world in migration. This pocket-sized, easy-to-read edition is a must-have for all those who hope that a better world is possible. In a clarion call to our collective humanity, Todd Miller makes a case for tearing down barriers-both at the borders and in our own minds-as the necessary first step to achieving security by building bridges, not walls"--