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 Federal Immigration 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.
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.
Humanizing Immigration
by
"Incisive and compelling, reflecting the painful wisdom and knowledge that Bill Ong Hing has accrued over the course of fifty years . . . "-Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow First book to argue that immigrant and refugee rights are part of the fight for racial justice; offers a humanitarian approach to reform and abolition Representing non-citizens caught up in what he calls the immigration and enforcement "meat grinder", Bill Ong Hing witnessed their trauma, arriving at this conclusion- migrants should have the right to free movement across borders-and the right to live free of harassment over immigration status. He cites examples of racial injustices endemic in immigration law and enforcement, from historic courtroom cases to the recent treatment of Haitian migrants. Hing includes histories of Mexican immigration, African migration and the Asian exclusion era, all of which reveal ICE abuse and a history of often forgotten racist immigration laws.
Benched Justice
by
This book delves into the complex and often politicized world of asylum claims and asylum rights of children seeking sanctuary in the United States. This book asks two vital questions: do immigration judges base their asylum decisions on more than just the law, and how have federal courts responded to executive policies and programs that significantly affect the rights of these minors? With over 12,000 immigration court decisions and 200 federal court cases as its backbone, this book uncovers how both legal and political factors shape the fate of children seeking asylum. The findings reveal that while political factors do influence the decision-making process, courts still strive to protect the legal rights of unaccompanied minors, pushing back against some of the more harmful and legally dubious immigration policies pursued by various Presidential administrations.
Precarious Protections
by
More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade, over a half million children have fled from Central America to the United States, seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence. Yet upon their arrival, they fail to find the protection that our laws promise, based on the broadly shared belief that children should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum, including the idea that people are being denied protection because they file bogus claims. In practice, the United States interprets asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence. This is especially true for children from Central America. Galli reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and exposes the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy.
CRS Report IF11898: The 287(g) Program: State and Local Immigration Enforcement
Immigrant Legal Resource Center: National Map of 287(g) Agreements. The ILRC has also an Ending 287(g) Toolkit for Local Organizers and other resources
American Immigration Council: The 287(g) Program: An Overview
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement: ICE's 287(g) Program: List of the participating local law enforcement agencies, with their Memoranda of Agreement
Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement
by
Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals, but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging.
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