Social Movements & the Law

President Trump delivered remarks on border security and immigration at a campaign-style event held from an airplane hangar in Yuma, Arizona. The president spoke about the border wall, the…

President Trump spoke with the press in Yuma, Arizona, after being updated on border wall construction. When he was asked about the recently completed Senate Intelligence Committee report…

"On February 15, 2019, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at America's southern border. He depicted a dire crisis, with criminals and drugs flowing unchecked into the country, unlawful border crossers overwhelming enforcement capacity, and dangerous immigrants disappearing into the nation's interior after being released from detention. With his presidential proclamation, he ordered the military to assist in hardening the border, and he declared his intent to re-direct billions of dollars to build the wall he had promised since he first announced his candidacy. In a striking rebuke, Congress voted to overturn the President's declaration of emergency. Never before had Congress rejected a president's proclamation under the National Emergencies Act. Some members decried the President's move as an unlawful usurpation of Congress's power of the purse. Congress had just rejected the administration's request for funds to build a border wall. In trying nonetheless to re-all ocate military funding to the project, critics contended, the President displayed contempt for Congress's constitutional authority to appropriate federal dollars. Many representatives argued further that the President had manufactured the crisis, emphasizing that adding an exceedingly expensive wall to already ample enforcement would not address the real problems at the border. Illegal crossings, they noted, had been declining for over a decade and were at historic lows during the President's first two years in office. The types of migrants now arriving at the border presented urgent legal and policy concerns, but not the threat the President imagined. They were families fleeing violence in Central America. They often sought out border patrol agents at ports of entry in order to request asylum, rather than cross through the desert to evade apprehension. A new wall would not stop them. President Trump promptly issued the very first veto of his administration and attempted to press forwa rd with his plans. His clash with Congress was partly about partisan disagreement. It reflected the deep gulf that now separates the Democratic and Republican parties on immigration policy. But even the Republican-controlled Senate voted to reject the President's emergency declaration. "The Senate vote," the Washington Post remarked the following day, "stood as a rare instance of Republicans breaking with Trump in significant numbers on an issue central to his presidency." It remains to be seen whether the President or Congress will emerge with the upper hand; as we go to press, the funding fight remains tied up in the courts. But the unfolding conflict has transcended partisanship, pitting Congress against the Executive in a battle for control of immigration policy"--

"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"--

It was a bold opening salvo from the incoming administration of President Joe Biden: an immigration bill that would open a path to citizenship for roughly 11 million people living in the country illegally. But even the Democratic senator leading the charge acknowledged on...

Immigrants and advocates say it represents a shift away from “dehumanizing” language.

The Biden administration is planning to speed up deportations for some migrant families who cross the US-Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security said Monday.

President Biden’s decision to maintain a Trump-era refugee cap drew swift blowback from Democrats and immigration advocates, many of whom were baffled by the administration’s move.According to Whit…

President Biden is canceling projects to build a wall along the southern border using diverted defense funds and will use some funding to counter environmental damage from the wall’s con…

Ed Gonzales has served as sheriff of Harris County, Texas, which is the third-largest sheriff's office in the country.

President Biden on Friday signed an order speeding refugee admissions but maintaining fiscal 2021 admissions at 15,000, a cap set by the Trump administration and a number far below the 62,500 figur…

Corrupt local elites thwarted some engagement efforts of the past decade, Biden’s new special envoy wrote.

The Census Bureau cannot meet President Trump’s deadline to report data on the number of undocumented immigrants surveyed in the census before Inauguration Day, The New York Times reported Thursday…

US District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled in favor of Texas and eight other conservative states that sued to halt the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Vice President Kamala Harris is facing backlash from conservatives for not having visited the southern border and from progressives for telling immigrants "Do not come."

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"--

Finalist, 2020 C. Wright Mills Award, given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Honorable Mention, 2021 Asian America Section Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association An inspiring look inside immigrant youth's political activism in perilous times Undocumented immigrants in the United States who engage in social activism do so at great risk: the threat of deportation. In Organizing While Undocumented, Kevin Escudero shows why and how--despite this risk--many of them bravely continue to fight on the front lines for their rights. Drawing on more than five years of research, including interviews with undocumented youth organizers, Escudero focuses on the movement's epicenters--San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City--to explain the impressive political success of the undocumented immigrant community. He shows how their identities as undocumented immigrants, but also as queer individuals, people of color, and women, connect their efforts to broader social justice struggles today. A timely, worthwhile read, Organizing While Undocumented gives us a look at inspiring triumphs, as well as the inevitable perils, of political activism in precarious times.