César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández's Blog, page 2

Chronicling Arizona’s Immigration Politics

Like the California of the 1990s, Arizona is where immigration politics have clashed most fiercely in the last decade or so. In their new book Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Versus the Latino Resistance, journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block dive deeply into the changing politics of Arizona, examining Joe Arpaio’s rise to prominence and the intensity of efforts to defeat him at the ballot box. In a conversation with me, the authors will discuss the changing politics of ...

Tracking ICE Surveillance

In less than two decades of existence, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has developed a sophisticated network of digital surveillance practices that relies heavily on partners in private industry and local government. On Tuesday, November 9, Tracking ICE Surveillance brings together two advocates at the forefront of efforts to understand ICE’s use of surveillance technologies for a conversation about modern immigration policing practices: Jacinta Gonzalez, Senior Campaign Organizer...

Private prison can’t pay $1/day, jury says

A federal jury in Washington sided with detainees and the state attorney general yesterday in a lawsuit claiming that private prison corporation GEO Group violated state minimum wage laws by paying detainees $1 per day to cook and clean at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. The verdict in two cases, Nwauzor v. The GEO Group, No. 3:17-cv-05769 (W.D. Washington September 26, 2017) and State of Washington v. GEO, No. 3:17-cv-05806 (WD Wash. October 9, 2017), now returns to t...

Tort Law Comes to Immigration Advocacy

As legislative attempts to alter immigration law have failed time and again, policies under the influence of executive branch agencies have become critical features of the immigration law landscape. Along with that, litigation has challenged officials’ efforts to mold immigration policies to reflect the political priorities of the administration occupying the White House. Advocates frequently turn to constitutional claims or the strictures of congressional enactments. But a few creative lawyers ...

Blocking Haitians, limiting asylum

The disturbing images of Border Patrol agents on horseback attempting to block migrants from entering the United States, widely shared in September, tap a long history of heavy-handed U.S. immigration law enforcement policies. In a public lecture I delivered for the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, a research center at Ohio State University, I described similarities in the decades-long approach toward Haitian migrants in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and in recent months. Even wh...

ICE updates enforcement priorities

A few months later than promised, the Department of Homeland Security today updated guidelines its agents are to use when deciding whether initiate immigration enforcement actions. In a memo signed by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, DHS commits to a comprehensive review of individual migrants to gauge whether they “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.”

Adopting three categories of threat, the departme...

Crimmigration Law (2nd edition)

I am thrilled to announce that the second edition of my book, Crimmigration Law, is now available. As the first book to map how criminal law and immigration law intersected in the United States, Crimmigration Law has become a go-to resource for journalists, advocates, and students. Since the first edition of Crimmigration Law was published in 2015, the politics of the United States ricocheted, immigration agencies were thrown into overdrive, and legal institutions rattled. The second edition of...

Immigration imprisonment is a choice

In a new online magazine called Inquest: A Decarceral Brainstorm, I wrote about options available to the Biden administration to reduce the size of ICE’s prison population. “In immigration prisons, mundane administrative decision-making masks physical trauma and violence. Under President Obama, they thrived. In the era of Donald Trump, they were glorified. Under President Biden, they should close. Instead, they are filling,” I wrote in Immigration Imprisonment is a Choice.

Describing spe...

ICE prison population returns to pre-pandemic levels

Six months into the Biden administration, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is holding as many people as it did before the Covid-19 pandemic sharply curtailed prison populations. In early July 2021, ICE held more people on an average day in its prison network than at any time since April 2020.

ICE records detention data using the federal government's fiscal year which begins October 1. According to the agency’s data, ICE held an average daily population of 27,292 people as of...

Supreme Court expands ICE detention power

In a split decision, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency can detain some migrants who fear for their lives if deported without giving them even the power to ask for release. The 6-3 decision, Johnson v. Guzman Chavez, No. 19-897 (U.S. June 29, 2021), expands ICE’s mandatory detention power over people who have previously been ordered removed from the United States, but who immigration officials find in the country. A dissenting opinion written by ...