Susan Montoya Bryan, Rio Yamat, Associated Press, Sept. 27, 2023 "Chinese immigrant workers allege they were lured to northern New Mexico under false pretenses and forced to work 14 hours a day...
Emily Creighton, Tsion Gurmu, AIC, Sept. 21, 2023 "[A] new report publishes some of the documents uncovered in that investigation and reveals the widespread involvement and abusive enforcement tactics...
Jon Campbell, Gothamist, Sept. 22, 2023 "Federal, state and city officials say they’re committed to identifying Venezuelan migrants in New York City who are now eligible for Temporary Protected...
AIC, Sept. 20, 2023 "Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, our Policy Director, testified before Congress to explain the positive economic contributions of immigrants in the U.S. and the ongoing challenge that...
Hillary Chura, CSM, Sept. 20, 2023 "What the president could do is issue an executive action that extends parole to more nationalities, says Stephen Yale-Loehr , an immigration law professor at...
Steve Vladeck, June 10, 2019
"The last time I wrote about the Trump administration’s abuse of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA) of 1998, I opened with Yogi Berra’s famous quip that “it’s like déjà vu all over again.” Two months later, maybe the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day” is a better frame. To make a long story short, the administration has installed former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (who apparently has no meaningful chance of formal Senate confirmation) as acting director of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). And although the manner in which President Trump pulled this off may not violate the plain letter of the FVRA, it certainly can’t be reconciled with the law’s spirit. ...
... In other words, through nothing other than internal administrative reshuffling — creating a new position and deeming it the first assistant — the Trump administration was able to bootstrap Cuccinelli into the role of acting director, even though, until today, he had never held any position in the federal government. ...
... All of which is to say, Cuccinelli’s appointment is probably not an outright violation of the FVRA. But in that respect, it only underscores how poorly drafted the FVRA is—and how easy it is for administrations not as readily subject to conventional political checks to take advantage of its open-endedness. By this logic, nothing would prevent naming anyone, at any time, to run almost any senior agency for as long as the FVRA allows—a minimum of 210 days and perhaps more depending on when a permanent successor is nominated. There are obvious ways to fix the FVRA to prevent this president (or his successors) from similarly bypassing the Senate’s role in cases like these. The problem is finding the bipartisan political willpower in Congress to adopt them."