Research Guides:
Government Publications:
Legislative Histories:
Database Practice Centers:
Practice Center pages from Westlaw and Lexis combine cases, statutes, regulations, administrative decisions, secondary sources, forms and news.
Organizations:
Lexis: All Immigration Law Cases: Immigration cases from District Courts, Courts of Appeals, and the Supreme Court. Lexis also has Immigration Law briefs, pleadings, and motions.
Lexis: All Immigration Law Administrative Materials: BIA Precedent and Non-precedent decisions. Office of Chief Administrative Hearing Officer Immigration Review Decisions.
Westlaw: Immigration Cases: District Courts, Courts of Appeal, Supreme Court. Westlaw also has immigration briefs, motions, and pleadings.
Westlaw: Immigration Administrative Decisions & Guidance: USCIS Administrative Appeals Office Decisions. EOIR: BIA Decisions and Memoranda, Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer Decisions.
Hein Online: Immigration Law & Policy in the US: BIA Precedent Decisions. Supreme Court Briefs. CRS Reports.
Executive Office for Immigration Review: BIA Precedent Decisions, OCAHO Published Decisions, Indexes to Agency Decisions by topic, and BIA interim decisions. You can subscribe to BIA precedent decisions. EOIR also has litigation notices and a large datafile of the agency's case file electronic database.
USCIS Adopted Administrative Appeals Office Decisions. Non-precedent decisions available as policy guidance.
Bloomberg Law: Searchable federal dockets and court documents from PACER.
Justia Dockets & Filings on Immigration: Find dockets by circuit and court, with links to PACER.
Treatises and Practice Guides:
Cases:
Country of Origin Information:
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Find facilities as well as Detention Standards, policies, and statistics.
Medical Processes and Communication Protocols Need Improvement at Irwin County Detention Center: US Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General. Jan. 3, 2022 report, OIG-22-14.
Books and treatises:
Detention Empire by
The early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of modern mass incarceration in the United States. The Mariel Cuban migration of 1980, alongside increasing arrivals of Haitian and Central American asylum-seekers, galvanized new modes of covert warfare in the Reagan administration's globalized War on Drugs. Using newly available government documents, Shull demonstrates how migrant detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency at the intersections of US war-making and domestic carceral trends. As the Reagan administration developed retaliatory enforcement measures to target a racialized specter of mass migration, it laid the foundations of new forms of carceral and imperial expansion. Reagan's war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on critical refugee studies, community archives, protest artifacts, and oral histories, Detention Empire also shows how migrants resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and allies on the outside--including legal advocates, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary movements--organized hunger strikes, caravans, and prison uprisings to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to US empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis, reckoning with these histories takes on new urgency.
Inside Private Prisons by
When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration--to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen's work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America's largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.
Forever Prisoners by
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 nineteenth 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. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation. Young shows how foreigners have been caged not just for immigration violations, but also held in state and federal prisons for criminal offenses, in insane asylums for mental illness, as enemy aliens in INS facilities, and in refugee camps. Since the 1980s, the conflation of criminality with undocumented migrants has given rise to the most extensive system of immigrant incarceration in the nation's history. Today over half a million immigrants are caged each year, some serving indefinite terms in what has become the world's most extensive immigrant detention system. And yet, Young finds, the rate of all forms of incarceration for immigrants was as high in the early twentieth century as it is today, demonstrating a return to past carceral practices. Providing critical historical context for today's news cycle, Forever Prisoners focuses on the sites of limbo where America's immigration population have been and continue to be held.
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