The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband, at their home was reportedly a migrant in the United States without the federal government’s authorization. David DePape has been charged with multiple crimes as a result of last week’s attack, including attempted murder, burglary, and assault with a deadly weapon. News reports now suggest that DePape is a Canadian citizen who last entered the United States in 2008. If he hasn’t left since then and no other information emerges about his citizenship status, he would certainly be in the United States in viol ..read more

President Biden announced a sweeping pardon of some marijuana drug offenders this week that promises to accelerate conversations about reforming drug laws. Through a Presidential Proclamation issued October 6, 2022, Biden pardoned all U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents convicted of simple possession of marijuana under federal law or under the laws of Washington, DC. Let me walk through some of the immigration law effects of the president’s bold action. First, Biden should be commended for pardoning some drug offenders. There aren’t too many people convicted of simple possession of ma ..read more

California’s immigrants’ rights movement suffered a big blow this week when a federal appellate court declared the state’s ban on private prisons likely unconstitutional. Assembly Bill 32, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019, took aim at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s massive prison network by undercutting the federal government’s private prison partners. AB 32 bars private detention sites anywhere in California. A different statute that wasn’t part of this lawsuit bars local governments from entering into new agreements to detain migrants. Combined, these two laws repres ..read more

U.S. citizens don’t need the federal government’s permission to enter and exit the United States. They can’t be forcibly removed from the United States, and they can’t be convicted of entering the United States without the federal government’s permission. Put simply, immigration law’s controls on movement are off-limits to U.S. citizens. But what happens when someone doesn’t know they are a U.S. citizen? The short answer is that things get complicated. For the longer answer, let’s turn to the experience of Javier Garza-Flores. Born in México in 1974, he always knew that he was a Mexican citize ..read more

The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected Republican attempts to hold onto the Migrant Protection Protocols, more commonly known as the Remain in Mexico program. In a split decision that spanned the Court’s ideological camps, six justices agreed that the Biden administration can end the Trump era initiative that turned back migrants at the southwestern border. In a separate opinion, Justice Amy Barrett noted that she agreed with the majority’s analysis on the merits of the dispute but, in her view, the Court should not have resolved those questions. Launched by the Trump administration in December ..read more

Another mass shooting in the United States means another instance in which migrants might have been victimized or witness to a crime. Details are quickly developing about what happened in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, but there is no reason to doubt that migrants weren’t present in some form either as students, employees, or nearby community members. After several mass shootings in recent years, migrants have come forward to assist police investigations. The treatment at the hands of federal immigration agents has been checkered, with at least one survivor being deported. It doesn’t have to be tha ..read more

Who should suffer when an immigration judge messes up? The migrant, a divided majority of the U.S. Supreme Court announced this week. In Patel v. Garland, the Court concluded that federal courts can’t review factual assessments made by immigration judges even when the immigration judge is wrong. Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion which Chief Justice Roberts joined along with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh. Justice Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. This case involved Pankajkumar Patel who entered the United States without the gove ..read more

This week the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency released guidance about the Biden administration’s approach to immigration court cases. Removal proceedings—the formal name for what most people refer to as deportation proceedings—are to be governed by the detailed memo issued on April 3 by ICE’s Principal Legal Advisor Kerry E. Doyle. In turn, the Doyle Memo builds on a separate memo issued in September 2021 by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. On behalf of the Biden administration, the Mayorkas Memo identified three priorities for DHS officials to use when making deci ..read more

In a pair of cases being argued today, the U.S. Supreme Court reviews the federal government’s power to detain migrants. This pair of cases, Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez and Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, raise similar legal issues: Can federal immigration officials detain a person indefinitely without the possibility of requesting release from an immigration judge when a person who is not a U.S. citizen has already been detained for at least 6 months and is waiting for immigration officials to decide whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States? In each case, a circuit court took t ..read more

Biden administration officials last month moved $180 million from one troubled contractor to another to ensure that it can keep using two South Texas facilities in which migrant youth are regularly detained. An official notice published in the Federal Register on November 30 indicates that $178,007,159 originally slated to go to Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. will now be paid to Southwest Key Programs, Incorporated. The federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, runs a network of facilities in which young migrants traveli ..read more