Social Movements & the Law

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.

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.