ACLU, Feb. 12, 2025 "Immigrants’ rights advocates sued the Trump administration today for access to immigrants transferred from the United States to detention at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba...
Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News, Feb. 12, 2025 "While the Trump administration has highlighted transfers of dangerous criminals and suspected gang members to Guantanamo Bay, it is also sending nonviolent...
Jane Porter, IndyWeek, Feb. 7, 2025 "A man who identified himself as a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent confronted two attorneys in the hallway of the third floor of the Wake...
Cyrus D. Mehta and Kaitlyn Box, Feb. 11, 2025 "Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship, which we analyzed in a previous blog , has now been temporarily enjoined and...
Monique Merrill, CNS, Feb. 10, 2025 "A coalition of refugees and agencies serving refugees are challenging President Donald Trump's executive order indefinitely pausing a refugee resettlement...
Doris Meissner, Ruth Ellen Wasem, MPI, Oct. 2021
"In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from a patchwork of agencies charged to varying degrees with counterterrorism and broader responsibilities relating to the protection of the homeland. The functions of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service became one of the department’s largest sets of responsibilities. Its three resulting immigration components—U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—made up 34 percent of the DHS budget and 44 percent of its personnel in fiscal year 2020.
Almost two decades since the department was founded in 2003, the immigration functions of these three components have been heavily defined by their national security dimensions, even as their missions encompass a much wider array of national interests—from economic competitiveness and travel facilitation, to legal immigration, and global leadership in refugee protection and foreign student education.
With action on immigration stalled in Congress, this report examines questions of structure—rather than policy—and proposes changes within the authority of the executive branch to enable DHS and related agencies to treat immigration as a system, allowing them to operate as one to successfully carry out the immigration mission in all its aspects.
The report is part of MPI’s Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy Initiative, launched in 2019. The initiative is generating a big-picture, evidence-driven vision for the role immigration can and should play in America’s future."