ImmigrationProf Blog

The Conversation: Texas is already policing the Mexican border − and will play an outsize role in any Trump plan to crack down on immigration

Professor Dan DeBree

In the Conversation (Texas is already policing the Mexican border − and will play an outsize role in any Trump plan to crack down on immigration), The Conversation’s senior politics editor, Naomi Schalit, spoke with Texas A&M professor Dan DeBree, a former Homeland Security official and Air Force veteran, about the other moves Texas has made that likely put it in a position to be a key player in carrying out immigration enforcement actions by the Trump administration.  DeBree states that "Texas is the epicenter of the struggle between federal and state entities" on immigration enforcement.  Click the link above for the full interview.

KJ

Immigrants in California

The Public Policy Institute of California has released a fact sheet on "Immigrants in California."

The fact sheet wass authored by Marisol Cuellar Mejia, Cesar Alesi Perez, and Hans Johnson.  California is home to nearly a quarter of the nation’s immigrants; foreign-born residents come from dozens of countries, and the vast majority are documented.  It offers these big picture facts:

"California has more immigrants than any other state.

• California is home to 10.6 million immigrants—22% of the foreign-born population nationwide.
• In 2023, the most current year of data, 27% of California’s population was foreign born, the highest share of any state and more than double the share in the rest of the country (12%).
• Almost half (45%) of California children have at least one immigrant parent.
• A third (34%) of prime-working-age adults—those 25 to 54—are foreign born; half (52%) of all foreign-born Californians are in this age group."

KJ

 

From the Bookshelves: Hiroshi Motomura, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy

Professor Hiroshi Motomura's book Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press 2025) is out.  The publisher describes the book as follows:

"A uniquely broad and fair-minded guide to making immigration policy ethical. Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration. In Borders and Belonging, Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept—national borders—and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them? Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy."

Last August, we posted the introduction to the book (with permission, of course).

KJ

Practice Advisory: Stays of Removal

The National Immigration Project and the American Immigration Council have issued  a new practice advisory on Stays of Removal. 

 

A stay of removal prevents the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from deporting a noncitizen from the United States while they continue to challenge their removal order or pursue an immigration benefit or humanitarian protection. This practice advisory discusses the law, procedure, and practical tips for seeking a stay of removal from DHS, immigration judges, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the U.S. courts of appeals.

 

This practice advisory updates a 2021 CLINIC advisory.

 

KJ

DACA on Life Support After Fifth Circuit Ruling

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit released a decision finding part of President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy unlawful.  Judge Jerry E. Smith authored the opinion, which was joined by Judges Edith Brown Clement and Stephen A. Higginson.  Here is the ruling.   Download DACA 5th Circuit Decision 2025

Courthouse News offered a summary of the decision.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released the following:

"Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a major victory in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which affirmed a district court’s ruling that the Biden Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) policy is unlawful. 

The Fifth Circuit concluded that Texas succeeded on the merits and remanded the case to the district court for further proceedings.  

“This is a win for Texas. I am pleased the Fifth Circuit found that the Biden Administration’s DACA policy was unlawful,” said Attorney General Paxton. “I look forward to working with President-elect Donald Trump to ensure that the rule of law is restored, and the illegal immigration crisis is finally stopped. Biden’s policies unleashed historic levels of lawlessness upon this country, and it is time to start fixing the mess the outgoing administration made.” 

To read the decision, click here."

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández offered his quick take on the Fifth Circuit DACA ruling.  He writes:

"Since only Texas has standing to sue the federal government over DACA, the court blocked DACA’s continuation only in Texas. Though the court doesn’t explain exactly what that means, presumably the federal government can’t renew DACA for people residing in Texas. For now, though, even that is on hold because the court issued a stay of its decision pending further intervention by the Supreme Court or the full Fifth Circuit."

Expect much analysis and criticism to follow.  Stay tuned.

KJ

 

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Immigration Article of the Day: The Limits of Immigrant Resilience

Huyen Pham

The Limits of Immigrant Resilience by Huyen Pham, Natalie Cook, Ernesto Amaral, Raymond Robertson, and Suojin Wang, Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 509-46, 2024

Abstract

Economists have identified important adaptations that immigrant workers have made to weather economic crises. During times of economic contraction, immigrant workers have moved across industries or geographical locations, downshifted to part-time work, and accepted lower wages to stay employed. Evidence from the Great Recession (2007–2009) shows the benefits of that economic resilience: immigrant workers were more likely than native-born workers to remain continuously employed, to have shorter periods of unemployment when they lost their jobs, and to regain jobs more quickly in the recovery period. Of course, these adaptations had significant personal costs for immigrant workers and their families, but in times of increased job competition, their resilience enabled them to keep jobs and crucial sources of income and had important, positive spillover effects for native-born workers.

Our research, however, shows important limits to that immigrant resilience. In our analysis of Current Population Survey (“CPS”) data during COVID-19, immigrant workers had worse employment outcomes than native-born workers. Looking at the restaurant industry as a case study, we found that immigrant workers were more likely to lose their jobs, keep only low-paying jobs within restaurants, or drop out of the labor market entirely, as compared to native-born workers. The sharply contrasting experiences of immigrant workers during these two crises can be explained by the nearly simultaneous and complete shutdowns that states imposed across the country during the pandemic. These shutdowns undercut any mobility and flexibility advantages that immigrant workers might otherwise have had and threatened immigrants’ already precarious economic positions. As we look to the real possibility of future pandemics, these limits on immigrant resilience counsel for increasing immigrant access to aid programs at both the federal and state levels to benefit both immigrant workers and the larger economy that relies heavily on immigrant productivity.

KJ

Immigration Article of the Day: Abandoning Deportation Adjudication by Aadhithi Padmanabhan

Abandoning Deportation Adjudication by Aadhithi Padmanabhan, Stanford Law Review (forthcoming 2025)

Abstract

The immigration court system—an executive agency that adjudicates hundreds of thousands of deportation cases every year—is experiencing profound crises of undercapacity and politicization of the adjudication process. Adjudicators in the system face extraordinary pressures to rush through cases as quickly as possible, even if that means ignoring material evidence or relying on biased heuristics to streamline proceedings. These pressures are likely to intensify with the Trump administration vowing to unleash the “largest deportation program in American history.”

Against this backdrop, judicial review plays an important oversight role, with courts counterbalancing the relentless need for speed by insisting on a certain minimum baseline of quality in adjudication. Courts engage in quality control by requiring agency adjudicators to exhibit reasoned decisionmaking—that is, to show they have considered relevant evidence in the record and to explain their reasoning. The goal is to incentivize more careful and impartial adjudication in each case in which a person’s potential banishment from the United States is at stake.

The Supreme Court gave short shrift to judicial review’s quality-control function when it held in Garland v. Ming Dai, 593 U.S. 357 (2021), that courts must affirm deportation orders even in cases where the agency’s analysis is not a model of clarity. Ming Dai, which did not purport to alter existing review standards, has flown under the scholarly radar. But circuit courts are paying attention. Invoking Ming Dai, judges across the country are contending that the reasoned decisionmaking requirements demand too much of the agency and exceed the power of federal courts to impose.

This Article describes and defends rigorous judicial review in deportation cases, sounds the alarm about the doctrinal experimentation that Ming Dai has inspired, and catalogs what we stand to lose if the more anemic form of judicial review being auditioned in the circuits today gains prominence. At a time when all eyes are trained on the judiciary’s war with the administrative state, this Article unearths a more obscure but no less consequential judicial project that aims to endow certain segments of the federal bureaucracy with vast power to administer justice as they see fit.

KJ

Official Presidential Portraits for President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance

 

The Trump Vance Transition team sent out the new official portraits for President-Elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-Elect JD Vance: https://t.co/FPyEYbmNIl pic.twitter.com/Mye6hqnm1J

— Local 12/WKRC-TV (@Local12) January 16, 2025

The official presidential portraits for President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance were shared by their transition team today.

KJ

Book Event Feb. 5: Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities by Ragini Shah

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Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum; Law School; and GBH Forum Network invite you to:  Join Suffolk Law Professor Ragini Shah in a conversation about her first book, Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities with Professor Shannon Gleeson, School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University Wednesday, February 5, 2025   120 Tremont Street, Fifth Floor Commons, Boston, MA   6:00 p.m.   This event is free and open to everyone   In-person registration is not required.   Register here to attend via ZOOM. Registration for Zoom PDF Flyer Theoretically sophisticated and poignantly written, Constructed Movements centers stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources along racial lines. Shah chronicles how three interrelated dynamics—the maldistribution of public resources, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the US immigration enforcement regime—entrench the necessity of migration as a strategy for survival in Mexico. She also highlights the alternative visions elaborated by migrant community organizations that seek to end the conditions that force migration. Recognizing that reform without recompense will never right an unjust migratory system, Shah concludes with a forceful call for the US and Mexican governments to make abolitionist investments and reparative compensation to directly counteract this legacy of extraction. KJ

College NIL Money Used to Benefit People in a Village in Mali

 

I admit that I am a college sports fan.  The relaxed transfer rules and Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) monies for athletes have changed college sports.  Although the changes are not in my view an improvement, I ran across this story that got me thinking.

Cal Bears basketball player, Mady Sissoko, who transferred from Michigan State, is using his NIL money for a very good cause:  

"He left his home village of Tangafoya, Mali, at the age of 15 to pursue a better life by playing basketball in the United States, a sport that he only loosely understood in a country that he could hardly imagine. Now 23 years old, Sissoko, a graduate student and starting center on the California men's basketball team, has not just made the most of his own opportunity; he's dramatically impacted the lives of those in Tangafoya for the better.
 
. . . . While most college athletes can profit from NIL, Sissoko attends school in the United States on a student visa and therefore is prohibited from directly benefitting from such opportunities.
 
Instead, Sissoko found a way within NCAA rules to give back to the people of Tangafoya. . . . [H]e created the Mady Sissoko Foundation -  a 501(c)(3) charity into which he has routed donations and other charitable contributions. He quickly surpassed the original goal of raising $50,000 and has since put the money toward building Tangafoya's first school, a well for clean drinking water and an irrigation system for farming, the purchase of a tractor and soon, the construction of a medical clinic. Donations and support continue to come in through Sissoko's GoFundMe campaign, which has raised more than $70,000."

Go Bears!

KJ

Trump's immigration policies could hurt LA's rebuilding

The Los Angeles fires ultimately will be put out.  And the rebuilding will begin.  Noah Sheidlower and Eliza Relman for Business Insider write that:

"Housing policy and immigration researchers say President-elect Donald Trump's plans for mass deportations could hamper efforts to rebuild the thousands of homes destroyed by the wildfires in Los Angeles and intensify the region's housing shortage.

Data from the National Association of Home Builders shows immigrants, including those living in the US illegally, make up a significant portion of California's construction workforce, which is already suffering from a shortage of workers.

The extent and scope of possible deportations after Trump takes office on January 20 is still unclear. However, researchers expect even the threat of immigration crackdowns to shrink the available construction workforce."

According to Working Immigrants in 2015, "[a]bout 2.4 million construction workers, nearly a quarter (24.7%) of the industry workforce, were born in foreign countries

The majority (84.3%) of foreign-born workers in construction were born in Latin American countries in which 53.1% were born in Mexico, 6.6% in El Salvador, 5.4% in Guatemala, 4.7% in Honduras, 2.4% in Cuba, 2.1% in Ecuador, and a small percentage in other countries in that area. Europeans made up 7.3% of foreign-born workers in construction, and 6.4% came from Asia."

This all makes sense.  Immigrants were important to the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast after Hurrican Katrina in 2005.

 

KJ

Chinese Immigrants in the United States

Madeleine Greene and Jeanne Batalova for the Migration Policy Institute in Chinese Immigrants in the United States provide a wealth of data. Chinese immigrants comprise the third largest foreign-born group in the United States, although numbers declined slightly following the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak. Historical arrivals from China in the 19th century prompted some of the United States’ first immigration restrictions, but recent immigrants have tended to be better educated and earn higher incomes than either immigrants overall or the native born.   Figure 1. Immigrant Population from China in the United States, 1980-2023 KJ

Immigration Article of the Day: LGBTQ ASYLUM AND REFUGEE PROTECTION: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS by Matthew J. Lister

LGBTQ ASYLUM AND REFUGEE PROTECTION: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS by Matthew J. Lister

Abstract

Despite marked improvements in rights for LGBTQ persons around the world, significant problems remain.  In many countries, LGBTQ persons face significant discrimination, lack of protection from harm by non-state actors, and persecution from their own governments. This article examines when and why protection under the UN Refugee Convention should be granted to those seeking asylum or refugee status because of maltreatment related to their LGBTQ status. To this end, Part II shows how LGBTQ asylum seekers straightforwardly fit into the definition of a “refugee” set out in the UN Refugee Convention. Subsequent Parts address how to overcome some potential complications arising out of the sorts of harms faced by LGBTQ applicants without significant modifications to the standard refugee definition.  The article then turns to two further areas of practical difficulty for LGBTQ asylum seekers and suggest approaches and reforms to deal with these problems. The first issue involves the interaction between considerations around the family and refugee and asylum law. While the legal protections of the rights of LGBTQ families have improved in many countries, difficulties remain, and even in cases where these rights have been granted by a state, there are often special difficulties faced by LGBTQ asylum seekers.  The article therefore proposes and justifies certain reforms in this area. Finally, the article address questions and concerns about the type of evidence that may be demanded by those adjudicating asylum and refugee cases involving LGBTQ applicants.

KJ

As LA Burned, Latina/o Immigrants Rushed to Put out Fires

 

The wildfires in Los Angeles have been in the news.  While a Fox News story has been circulating about an undocumented immigrant possibly starting one of the fires, another immigration story has not gotten much attention.  But it is a positive story about Latina/o immigrants.  A few days ago, NPR’s Morning Edition reported that groups of Latino immigrants gathered to extinguish the fires and help their neighborhoods.  I found the story uplifting in a dark time.

 

 

KJ

Biden DHS Secretary Defends Record in Interview

 

Steve Inskeep interviewed the outgoing Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas.  The interview focused on terrorism, national security, and the many functions of the DHS.  There is not much discussion of immigration excerpt for this exchange:

"INSKEEP: Isn't Customs and Border Protection also understaffed?

MAYORKAS: Yes, it is. And we need more border patrol agents. We need more customs officials. And this is not only to serve our nation's physical security, but it also facilitates lawful trade and travel and will serve to fuel America as an economic engine."

 

As the Biden administration winds down, Mayorkas is doing interviews to defend his record.  Here is another one with Rebecca Santana of Associated Press, which discusses immigration in more detail.   One telling passage from the AP report on the interview:

"Mayorkas became a lightning rod for criticism about border security and was impeached in early 2024 by Republicans who argued that he wasn’t upholding immigration laws. At the time, Mayorkas called those charges politically motivated and baseless. . . . The secretary said the department had to build the capacity to do things like beef up the number of expedited removals and pointed to a lack of funding from Congress."

Fair or not, Mayorkas will probably be most remembered for his impeachment.  Unlike Barack Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Mayorkas will not leave a signature policy like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) as a legacy.

KJ

Asian Law Caucus Know-Your-Rights Guide

The Asian Law Caucus has released a new know-your-rights guide for immigrant communities, which will be updated.

 The guide covers

• Your rights with federal agencies, including what to do if ICE comes to your home or workplace
• Workers’ rights and tenants’ rights for undocumented Californians
• Your rights to protest and activism 

 

The Asian Law Caucus is holding a February 4 online workshop on how to build community resilience against anti-immigrant and anti-Asian harassment and discrimination. 

KJ

Trump's border czar Tom Homan wants a "new" tip line to catch undocumented immigrants

Official 2017 Picture of Tom Homan, Director, Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Last week, Tom Homan, named by President-elect Donald Trump’s as the "border czar," told NBC News that he is pitching the "fresh idea" of a hotline to report immigrants who they believe are in the United States unlawfully here and have committed crimes.  

“I want a place where American citizens can call and report,” Homan, the former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said. “We need to take care of the American people. We need to make sure they have an outlet to help report child traffickers, forced labor traffickers. We want to give them an opportunity to be a part of the fix.” 

The truth is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has had a tip line for more than 20 years.

KJ

US Immigration in 2025

The Rural Migration News blog reports that the United States has 50 million or almost 20 percent of the world’s 280 million international migrants, far more than Germany (16 million), Saudi Arabia (13 million), and Russia (12 million). The US admits over a million legal immigrants a year, two-thirds because they have family members already in the US who sponsor them, and hosts another 11 million unauthorized foreigners and millions more foreigners who have a temporary legal status.

KJ

Trump 2.0 and Farm Labor

The Rural Immigration News blog reviews the possible impacts of a second Trump administration on farm labor.  

California accounts for 1/3 of average farm employment

KJ

Governor Ron DeSantis calls special session to implement Trump immigration crackdown

Julia Manchester for The Hill reports that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (Republican) "called for a special legislative session to implement President-elect Trump’s immigration agenda during his first 100 days in office. 

`I’m going to call the Legislature into special session starting the week of Jan. 27,' DeSantis said at a press conference Monday. `We have the next president taking office Jan. 20, we anticipate  executive orders to be issued immediately after the swearing-in and the inaugural address.' 

`We’re going to have some time to process and make sure we’re doing what we need to do, but then we need to act and we need to act quickly,' the governor said."

KJ