My friend Morgan Smith wrote this note about the Rio Grande in July 2024. Learn more about Morgan here , here and here .
J.A.M. v. USA "The Court holds that Oscar is entitled to a much lower, but still notable award of $175,000 because he was somewhat older at the time of the incident, was detained for about half...
Path2Papers, July 17, 2024 " What are the policy changes the Biden administration is implementing regarding temporary work visas? On June 18, 2024, the Biden administration announced a policy...
DOJ, July 18, 2024 "The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Southwest Key Programs Inc. (Southwest Key), a Texas-based nonprofit that provides housing to unaccompanied children who are...
Jeanne Kuang, CalMatters, July 18, 2024 "Even with all the industries where Californians went on strike during last year’s “hot labor summer,” some of the most active sites of...
Rachel Morris, Highline, Nov. 24, 2019
"IN THE TWO YEARS AND 308 DAYS THAT DONALD Trump has been president, he has constructed zero miles of wall along the southern border of the United States. He has, to be fair, replaced or reinforced 76 miles of existing fence and signed it with a sharpie. A private group has also built a barrier less than a mile long with some help from Steve Bannon and money raised on GoFundMe. But along the 2,000 miles from Texas to California, there is no blockade of unscalable steel slats in heat-retaining matte black, no electrified spikes, no moat and no crocodiles. The animating force of Trump’s entire presidency—the idea that radiated a warning of dangerous bigotry to his opponents and a promise of unapologetic nativism to his supporters—will never be built in the way he imagined.
And it doesn’t matter. In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, his administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration. No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. Among immigration lawyers, the cumulative effect of these procedural changes is known as the invisible wall."