There’s a tale that Abraham Lincoln was asked, “If you call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?” His evocative answer was, “Four.” Evocative because we learn so much about Lincoln from the answer. At least this is what I taught in school as a child. No one ever taught me what it taught about Lincoln or even why it was the right answer. I, in my “not going to become President” manner, am partial to…

For years before it actually happened in 2003, many immigration-law pundits advocated for the division of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into different components. The idea was that the cultures of benefit granting and enforcement were incompatible. When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2003, the immigration functions of the INS were moved from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and given to the new DHS. Within DHS, INS functions were, like a dream come true…

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…

Immigration dilettantes are having a field day with the issuance of some Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memos. Memos are policy statements of an agency directing employees how to handle certain situations. Everyone employed by someone else deals with memos. “If it gets to be over 90 degrees make sure to rest your employees 15 minutes every hour. If it gets to be over 100 degrees, send everyone home.” ICE’s memos serve to give direction to a large agency responsible…