(Im)migration Movements & the Law

Proponents say sanctuary citites encourage better police relations. Opponents say the cities harbor criminals.

A growing movement of immigrant and over 700 faith communities doing what Congress and the Administration refuse to do: protect and stand with immigrants facing deportation.

One way people of faith and conscience can help provide sanctuary is by working partners in cities, counties, school districts and other local governmen...

Sanctuary policies do not conceal or shelter unauthorized immigrants from detection. Here's what you need to know about these policies.

Background on so-called sanctuary policies and answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ) on federal, state and local action on immigration enforcement.

Ballotpedia: The Encyclopedia of American Politics

Naomi Tsu, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, answers questions about sanctuary cities.

The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Thursday the conclusion of a week-long targeted enforcement operation that resulted in the apprehension of more than 170 at-large aliens throughout the U.S., where sanctuary policies have largely prohibited the cooperation of law enforcement agencies in the arrest of criminal aliens.

It's already illegal under state law, but Republicans in the Arizona Legislature want voters enshrine to a ban on "sanctuary city'' policies in the state Constitution.

A look back at the leaders and laws that have shaped Chicago's involvement with the sanctuary movement since 1982.

The arrests were made in Seattle, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., from October 3-9.

The latest sanctuary cities news from The Texas Tribune.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Voters in one of Arizona's most liberal cities rejected an initiative Tuesday that would have made Tucson the state's only sanctuary city amid concerns that it went too far in restricting police officers...

What is a sanctuary city? And can Trump really defund them? Here's a look at what the term means and its implications in immigration policy under Trump.

This report - Federal Funding of America’s Sanctuary Cites - quantified federal funding (FY2016) to the agencies and entities of America’s 106 Sanctuary Cities.

On January 27, 2017, Executive Order 13769 went into effect, banning foreign nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United

Amidst looming threats of mass deportation from the incoming administration, what is the role of local governments and local law enforcement?

Sanctuary city refers to municipal jurisdictions, typically in North America, that limit their cooperation with the national government's effort to enforce immigration law. Leaders of sanctuary cities say they want to reduce fear of deportation and possible family break-up among people who are in the country illegally, so that such people will be more willing to report crimes, use health and social services, and enroll their children in school. In the United States, municipal policies include prohibiting police or city employees from questioning people about their immigration status and refusing requests by national immigration authorities to detain people beyond their release date, if they were jailed for breaking local law.[1] Such policies can be set expressly in law (de jure) or observed in practice (de facto), but the designation "sanctuary city" does not have a precise legal definition. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated in 2018 that 564 U.S. jurisdictions, including states and municipalities, had adopted sanctuary policies.[2][3][4]

"The city of El Centro is located in southern California's Imperial Valley, near the US-Mexico border. Surrounded by desert, sand dunes, and mountains, it is isolated and difficult to reach, but has long been an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley's agricultural economy and proximity to the border. The Shadow of El Centro tells the story of how the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp of 1945 evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants-a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced"--

"In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quotas of the 1920s that had severly limited immigration to American from everywhere but Western Europe. The result was mass immigration from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The wave of immigration and the restrictionism it produced led to a bitter political struggle over immigrants' rights that continues to this day. This book is a history of the post-1965 political battles between advocates of expansive admissions policies, rights, and benefits for immigrants and their anti-immigration, or restrictionist, opponents. Coleman argues that as immigration rendered what had once been seen as hard boundaries of the physical nation-state into something more porous, the rights of immigrations became crucial to immigration control. Restrictionists sought to limit immigrants' access to the American welfare state by arguing that they were a burden to the state and taking jobs from working- and middle-class Am ericans. However, the legacies of the civil rights movement, a growing commitment to deregulation, unusual political alliances, and institutional structures provided significant barriers to anti-immigration efforts. By the end of Reagan's presidency, restrictionists efforts to reverse the flow of immigration rights failed at the national level. In the 1990s, however, with national policy-making gridlocked, restrictionists focused their efforts on the state level. States acquired new powers in driving immigration policy and curtailed the expanded notion of alienage rights that had been forged over the previous decades. Coleman provides a new way of understanding the political history of immigration, looking not at borders and admissions policy but at the broad, internal battles over domestic policy that resulted from immigration. The author draws on a wealth of new sources from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations as well as from immigration and civil rights organizations. Th is book reveals that the current wave of anti-immigration sentiment seen in the electoral success of Donald Trump is not a recent phenomenon but has deep roots in the post-1965 immigration battles"--

"A deeply reported, newsbreaking account the humanitarian crisis of our time by the journalist who has been at the center of the story: MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, winner of the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award, offers a chilling expose of the human cost of the Trump administration's border and immigration policies"--;In June 2018, Donald Trump's most notorious decision as president--the systematic separation of thousands of desperate migrant families at the US-Mexico border--had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in custody. His influential series of reports ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the president reversing his own policy and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. Soboroff has spent the past two years reporting the many strands of this complex narrative, developing sources from within the Trump administration who share critical details for the first time. He also traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the U.S. border, where they were separated--the son ending up in Texas, and the father thousands of miles away, in the Mojave desert of central California. And he joins the heroes who emerged to challenge the policy, and who worked on the ground to reunite parents with children.

"Through extensive ethnographic study of the aftermath of an ICE raid in one Latino community in Michigan, the author details the incredible strain that it placed on the community, the families, and the individuals left behind. Lopez's case study reveals the public health impacts of ICE raids on stable immigrant communities in the heartland of the country"--

Immigration is among the most prominent, enduring, and contentious features of our globalized world. Yet, there is little systematic, cross-national research on why countries "do what they do" when it comes to their immigration policies. Rights, Deportation, and Detention in the Age of Immigration Control addresses this gap by examining what are arguably the most contested and dynamic immigration policies--immigration control--across 25 immigrant-receiving countries, including the U.S. and most of the European Union. The book addresses head on three of the most salient aspects of immigration control: the denial of rights to non-citizens, their physical removal and exclusion from the polity through deportation, and their deprivation of liberty and freedom of movement in immigration detention. In addition to answering the question of why states do what they do, the book describes contemporary trends in what Tom K. Wong refers to as the machinery of immigration control, analyzes the determinants of these trends using a combination of quantitative analysis and fieldwork, and explores whether efforts to deter unwanted immigration are actually working.

" "State alert as pregnant asylum seekers aim for Ireland." "Country Being Held Hostage by Con Men, Spongers, and Those Taking Advantage of the Maternity Residency Policy." From 1997 to 2004, headlines such as these dominated Ireland's mainstream media as pregnant immigrants were recast as "illegals" entering the country to gain legal residency through childbirth. As immigration soared, Irish media and politicians began to equate this phenomenon with illegal immigration that threatened to destroy the country's social, cultural, and economic fabric. Pregnant on Arrival explores how pregnant immigrants were made into paradigmatic figures of illegal immigration, as well as the measures this characterization set into motion and the consequences for immigrants and citizens. While focusing on Ireland, Eithne Luibheid's analysis illuminates global struggles over the citizenship status of children born to immigrant parents in countries as diverse as the United States, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Scholarship on the social construction of the illegal immigrant calls on histories of colonialism, global capitalism, racism, and exclusionary nation building but has been largely silent on the role of nationalist sexual regimes in determining legal status. Eithne Luibheid turns to queer theory to understand how pregnancy, sexuality, and immigrants' relationships to prevailing sexual norms affect their chances of being designated as legal or illegal. Pregnant on Arrival offers unvarnished insight into how categories of immigrant legal status emerge and change, how sexual regimes figure prominently in these processes, and how efforts to prevent illegal immigration ultimately redefine nationalist sexual norms and associated racial, gender, economic, and geopolitical hierarchies. "--

For most of America's history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. As a result, almost 400,000 people annually now spend some time locked up pending the result of a civil or criminal immigration proceeding. In Migrating to Prison, leading scholar Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez takes a hard look at the immigration prison system's origins, how it currently operates, and why.

Sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time-the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Leon uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of "Prevention through Deterrence," the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. In harrowing detail, De Leon chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. [from the publisher]

The impact of the U.S. immigration and legal systems on children and youth. In the United States, millions of children are undocumented migrants or have family members who came to the country without authorization. The unique challenges with which these children and youth must cope demand special attention. Illegal Encounters considers illegality, deportability, and deportation in the lives of young people--those who migrate as well as those who are affected by the migration of others. A primary focus of the volume is to understand how children and youth encounter, move through, or are outside of a range of legal processes, including border enforcement, immigration detention, federal custody, courts, and state processes of categorization. Even if young people do not directly interact with state immigration systems--because they are U.S. citizens or have avoided detention--they are nonetheless deeply affected by the reach of the government in its many forms. Contributors privilege the voices and everyday experiences of immigrant children and youth themselves. By combining different perspectives from advocates, service providers, attorneys, researchers, and young immigrants, the volume presents rich accounts that can contribute to informed debates and policy reforms. Illegal Encounters sheds light on the unique ways in which policies, laws, and legal categories shape so much of daily life for young immigrants. The book makes visible the burdens, hopes, and potential of a population of young people and their families who have been largely hidden from public view and are currently under siege, following their movement through complicated immigration systems and institutions in the United States.--Publisher website.

"Criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses have more than doubled over the last two decades, as national debates about immigration and criminal justice reforms became headline topics. What lies behind this unprecedented increase? From Deportation to Prison unpacks how the incarceration of over two million people in the United States gave impetus to a federal immigration initiative--The Criminal Alien Program (CAP)--designed to purge non-citizens from dangerously overcrowded jails and prisons. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the findings in this book reveal how the Criminal Alien Program quietly set off a punitive turn in immigration enforcement that has fundamentally altered detention, deportation, and criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses. Patrisia Mac��as-Rojas presents a "street-level" perspective on how this new regime has serious lived implications for the day-to-day actions of Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement, civil and human rights advocates, and for migrants and residents of predominantly Latina/o border communities. From Deportation to Prison presents a thorough and captivating exploration of how mass incarceration and law and order policies of the past forty years have transformed immigration and border enforcement in unexpected and important ways."--Back cover

Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders, even though many of have lived and worked in this country for years, has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power. Although the rhetoric surrounding these individuals is extreme, the US government has been locking up immigrants since the late 19th century, often for indefinite periods and with limited ability to challenge their confinement. 'Forever Prisoners' offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States.

"An anthology of essays by migration scholars telling fieldwork-based stories of those affected by U.S. immigration law enforcement"--