Why are families with minors streaming to our borders?

Sunday, June 22nd, 2014

The news is full of stories about how families with children and unaccompanied minors are flooding into the United States from Latin America. It is bad times in Latin America. Families are coming to America fleeing crime, violence, and the impacts of climate change. News reports indicate that people are operating under the misconception that the laws have changed and they are welcome in the United States. Changes in administrative practice may have helped foster that opinion. Some people attributeĀ …

The President is not the only determinant in deportation numbers.

Sunday, May 4th, 2014

For all these past five or six years we have been reading about how President Obama is the deporter in chief because of the large numbers of deportations under his watch. Recently, data has been published that shows that these deportations have not been happening in immigration court, but rather at ports of entry. Critics of the President somehow are (mis)construing the data as proof that the President has not been a party to the deportation numbers, somehow divorcing him…

ICE returns to policy of lengthy detention of asylum seekers.

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

One of the first and one of the best thing s President Obama did when he first became President was to reverse the Bush-administration policy of detaining nearly all arriving-alien asylum seekers until their cases were adjudicated in the immigration court which I discussed here. His administration instead allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release asylum-seeking aliens after they successfully completed a credible fear interview. As forĀ  arriving aliens with families or who were pregnant, the government would most often…

TRAC Report Shows Misapprehension of Immigration Court Role

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which describes itself as a data gathering, data research and data distribution organization at Syracuse University issues statistical reports about immigration court matters. TRAC reports analyze backlogs in the immigration courts and compared statistics about grant rates for different types of cases in the different immigration courts and by immigration judges. On November 9, 2010, it issued a report, “ICE Seeks to Deport the Wrong People,” which analyzed the results of immigration court proceedings…