William H. Frey, Nov. 29, 2023 "Immigration has become one of the nation’s most contentious political issues. Yet there has been less public attention paid to broader immigration policy than...
The current federal Immigration and Nationality Act is based on a bill passed by Congress in 1952. But did you know that President Harry Truman vetoed the bill? Congress overrode his veto. Here is his...
ABA, Dec. 4, 2023 "American Bar Association President Mary Smith wrote to the U.S. Senate to urge senators to continue working towards bipartisan solutions to the difficult challenges presented...
USA v. Abbott "In July 2023, Texas, at the direction of Governor Greg Abbott, installed a floating barrier in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas. The United States filed a civil enforcement action...
Sareen Habeshian, Axios, Dec. 1, 2023 "Texas lawmakers' effort to block the Biden administration from removing razor wire fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border was blocked by a federal judge...
Kate Evans & Robert Koulish, 24 Lewis & Clark Law Review (forthcoming 2020)
"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security arrests as many as 500,000 migrants per year and detains more than 350,000 of them through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since 2012, ICE has relied on an automated Risk Classification Assessment (RCA) system to recommend whom to detain and whom to release. The authors are the first to obtain access to its algorithm and this article is the first to make that system’s methodology public. While purportedly basing these recommendations on indicia of flight risk and risk to public safety, the RCA in fact relies on an algorithm driven by political preferences. By linking detention to enforcement policy rather than risk, the RCA lost its underpinning in the constitution. In addition, compromises in its logic thwarted the program’s ability to deliver the harm reduction, transparency, and uniformity it promised. Ultimately, our data and analysis reveal that that manipulation of the RCA resulted in automated detention recommendations for hundreds of thousands of people in violation of the constitution. The RCA thus delivers mass incarceration of immigrants with staggering efficiency. In the end, we argue the RCA supplied a veneer of risk to a tool of punishment."