President Trump once again blew our minds after trumpeting immigration enforcement efforts against veterans’ spouses, school children, cancer patients, and pregnant women, raiding 7-11’s, Homes Depot, businesses, farms, factories, schools, courthouses, churches, etc., when his administration announced on Saturday  that it was halting investigations of the agricultural industry, including meat packers, restaurants and hotels.   (If Trump were Harry Truman, would he have included haberdasheries? Will he add real estate developer construction to his safe list?). We went from every undocumented…

Maybe I’m hearing “Who Killed Bambi”  but it seems the Board of Immigration Appeals is at it again; issuing decisions that facilitate Trump administration immigration policies at the policies’ very inception. The newest Trump-administration policy is re-calendaring administratively closed removal hearings. By way of background, beginning in the early 2010’s until President Trump took office the first time in 2017, the administration’s policy was to encourage immigration courts to administratively close cases. Administrative closing is essentially where the immigration court…

After an evolution from simple to very complicated, the BIA, in another miraculous coincidence, has issued a decision to support a brand new Trump-administration policy. I say another, because I recently wrote about Matter of A-A-R-, where the BIA has tried to buttress a Trump-administration scheme to send U.S. deportees to El Salvadoran prisons by making it extremely difficult to prove eligibility for the humanitarian protections of asylum, withholding of removal, and U.N. Convention Against Torture relief. This new BIA…

One of the most egregious of the deportations since President Trump resumed office was the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Apparently, as gleened from press accounts, Abrego Garcia entered the United States without inspection in 2011 fleeing gang violence in his native El Salvador. He was encountered and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2019 and was granted Withholding of Removal by an immigration judge.   He was not able to win asylum because of a rule that an…