A recent case in the Ninth Circuit, Perez-Camacho v. Garland,  reminded me of a blog post which I thought of recent vintage, but thanks to the Covid time warp, was actually six years ago. The case involved a former U.S. Marine who was able to return to the United States after having been deported approximately fifteen years earlier after a conviction and two year prison sentence for animal cruelty. The blog from 2017 discussed the tension in the law between…

Lot’s of people are coming to the border. There are the old favorites; Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans. There are Haitians, and Syrians and a smattering of everyone else. And now newcomers or surges of old faves. We have Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, Russians, and Afghanis. What is a country to do? How to handle the flow? First, the nonsense solutions – bar their entry, delay (meter) their entry, arrest them and lose their children – a hoped-for disincentive…

Some may recall that immediately after IIRIRA, in 1997 and 1998, there was great concern that judicial review of agency action would be decimated. We were in dread awaiting a decision in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. When the decision came out, to our collective relief, it limited the jurisdiction-stripping threat from the new law. Circuit court decisions held that judicial review existed, even in cases dealing with decisions involving discretionary determinations, a major jurisdiction-stripping aspect of IRIIRA. For example,…

News from the United States-Mexico border centers on Ukrainians and Russians coming to seek asylum. Some are let in and some are not. The basis for denying entry is what the media refers to “Title 42,” a term oblique to the layman, reminding one of other mysterious number-based monikers like Area 51, District 9, or Studio 54. Title 42 (The Public Health and Welfare) refers to one of the 54 volumes of federal statutes  – laws passed by Congress. Readers…