ImmigrationProf Blog

Immigrant innovators outpace American inventors

Past research points to the significant role immigrants play in American innovation. Studies have shown that immigrants represent nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They comprise more than a quarter of the nation’s Nobel Prize winners. A recent study by Professor Rebecca Diamond of Stanford and her colleagues, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, a PhD student at Stanford GSB; Beatriz Pousadaopen in new window, a PhD student at Stanford; Shai Bernsteinopen in new window of Harvard Business School; and Timothy McQuadeopen in new window of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, directly measure the output of patents from foreign-born inventors living in the US in their working paper. Their conclusion: "The average immigrant is substantially more productive than the average U.S.-born inventor."

The researchers started with an understanding of how social security numbers work: their first numbers contain the year of birth. In their database, they identified 300 million adults who had lived in the country between 1990 and 2016 and then used Social Security numbers to identify those who had immigrated after age 19. Using names and address history, the researchers matched individuals in the database to those listed as inventors with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Their findings show that immigrants generate patents across a broad swath of sectors, including computers, electronics, chemicals, and medicine. They also discovered that, while all inventors reach peak productivity in their late 30s and early 40s, immigrants decline from that peak at a slower rate than U.S.-born inventors over the rest of their careers.

Why? Some of the trend can be explained by self-selection since the types of people who migrate to the U.S. on high-skilled visas are likely to be successful. Another factor is the positive effect of diversity: collaboration with inventors in other countries and use of foreign technologies in their patented products seemed to yield productivity. Whatever the causes, the effects redound to U.S. scientists and society. The authors say the policy implication is:

The U.S. has done an amazing job of attracting the best and the brightest immigrants. Any policy that would revamp the visa process might want to consider how big a deal immigrants are in our innovation output.

MHC

New Research from TRAC: Immigration Judges Overturn Negative Credible Fear Findings in 25% of Cases

A new research report finds that, on average, slightly over 25 percent of IJ decisions over the last 25 years have found that migrants had established having a credible fear of persecution or torture after an asylum officer initially denied the claim. 

The report examines over 100,000 credible fear cases have been heard by Immigration Judges. These cases determine whether the migrant has a credible fear of persecution or torture if returned to their home country. Given their critical nature, these cases receive priority on the Court’s docket and go to the head of the line. There they are speedily decided. On average, these decisions are made within ten days. Last month in February 2023, cases took an average of just five days.

The number of credible fear cases has generally been rising. It wasn’t until FY 2010 that cases climbed above 1,000 per year. In FY 2014, cases jumped to over 6,000 and they rose above 12,000 during FY 2019. This rise in large part reflects the increasing number of persons seeking asylum in this country, particularly along the US-Mexico border.

Nationality is a significant determinant in asylum decisions, so it is not surprising that IJs’ credible fear decisions also vary by country.

For example, Court records during the Biden years show Armenians, although relatively small in number (47) had the highest rate of establishing credible fear in their hearings before an Immigration Judge. Their rate was 70 percent. This was followed by individuals from Cameroon (68%), and Syria (65%). Nationalities with the least success in establishing credible fear during FY 2021 – February 2023 were migrants from Brazil (16%), Costa Rica (16%), and the Dominican Republic (19%).

See the whole report here: https://trac.syr.edu/reports/712/.

Belonging Barometer

Nichole Argo and Hammad Sheikh have jointly created a Belonging Barometer as a tool to empirically measure the components of belonging. The relationship between belonging and health, democracy, and intergroup relationships in family, work, and community is studied using the tool.  Policy interventions are suggested based on the data from the report.

The report describes its purposes and proposed uses of the tool in this way:

One purpose of this report is to call attention to belonging as a factor that matters deeply for leaders and stakeholders across diverse sectors. We make the case for including belonging in the design and implementation of programs and policies across all areas of life in the United States. A second purpose is to propose a nuanced new tool for measuring belonging—the Belonging Barometer—that is robust, accessible, and readily deployable in the service of efforts to advance the common good. As with any new tool, it is our hope that the Belonging Barometer can and should be refined and improved upon over time. We offer it up to changemakers across the world and welcome feedback and collaboration.

Key findings from the report:

• Belonging is measurably multifaceted
• Belonging is vital for American society
• A majority of Americans report non-belonging in the workplace, their community, or the nation. Socioeconomic factors are strongly associated with levels of reported belonging across spheres of life. Other factors include age, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and immigration status in some settings.
• Belonging and diversity are interdependent, with Americans who have friends from other races or living in multiracial neighborhoods feeling a greater sense of belonging and more openess to continuing demographic change. Unfortunately, many Americans lack these kinds of relationships.

The overall recommendation of the report is to recognize that belonging is attainable. Policy interventions can be designed to cultivate improved outcomes on the belonging barometer.

Over Zero, Center for Inclusion and Belonging, American Immigration Council worked together to produce the report. 

MHC

UCLA Report: Anti-AAPI Racism in Immigration and Criminal Law

UCLA Center for Immigration law and Policy Fellow Astghik Hairapetian and Professor Hiroshi Motomura co-author a new report, Anti-AAPI Racism in Immigration and Criminal Law. The report examines the foundation for discrimination, hate, and violence against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities laid by immigration laws that cast AAPI communities as “foreign” or less than fully American. In its own words: "The report sheds light on the intersection of criminal and immigration law and the anti-AAPI origins of laws that remain at the core of this country’s immigration and criminal legal frameworks."

The key findings in the report:

• Immigration laws containing criminal provisions were explicitly racist from 1873-1990, with persistent effects from even after federal laws moved toward racially neutral language. Part of the reason is the retention of Crimes involving moral turpitude and controlled substance violations as a basis for exclusion and deportation.
• State laws amplify racist federal laws, even in progressive states like California
  •  State and local enforcement permit transfers to ICE and some local enforcement agencies may use their resources for immigration enforcement
  • Attorney representation is not universally available. Where it is available, funds often cannot be used to represent individuals in removing proceedings with criminal convictions.
  • Gang databases mark certain individuals in a manner that carries adverse immigration consequences. The databases often have significant errors.
• The impacts on AAPI communities include emotional and financial devastation when families are split and single parents are left to care for children following deportation.

Recommendations to correct the broader history of anti-AAPI racism and curb lingering effects include:

• Stop transfers to ICE
• Provide universal representation for all immigrants
• Discontinue gang databases
• Amend state criminal laws to eliminate or mitigate immigration consequences

The Center is directed by Motomura and Ahilan Arulunantham. UCLA has conducted many other reports on anti-AAPI violence, including the creation of this interactive map.

MHC

ICE Contractor That Manages Alternatives to Detention Reported False Data to Government TRAC Report Shows

A new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University finds that BI, the company that runs ICE's Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program reported inaccurate data to the government for months in 2022.

Data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that the number of immigrants on GPS ankle monitors was inflated, possibly with financial consequences. The report states:

Misreporting involved more than the use of monitoring technologies. Substantial public funds may also be at stake. Comparing the supposedly “corrected” FY 2022 year-end report with the original version showed that ATD costs and presumably payments due the contractor also had substantially been inflated.

About 1 in 9 of the individuals BI had reported “monitoring” now showed up under the heading “no technology” with no charges due. Daily costs reported also dropped because use of GPS ankle monitors result in payments that were nearly 3 times higher per participant than use of SmartLINK. All in all, payments due BI were apparently inflated by 31 percent as a result of these reporting errors."

Read the rest of the report title "False Reporting by Contractor on Alternatives to Technology Activities" here: https://trac.syr.edu/reports/710/.

- Austin Kocher

New Report: The Everywhere Border

Check out the new report by Mizue Aizeki, Laura Bingham, and Santiago Narváez: The Everywhere Border: Digital Migration Control Infrastructure in the Americas.

Here is the abstract:

The US is building a digital border infrastructure in neighbouring countries that expands and deepens surveillance, while hiding state violence. The implications of this new infrastructure will be long-lasting and need to be integrated into strategies of resistance of migrant justice movements worldwide.

IE

TRAC Finds Immigration Judges Working Faster, Still Can't Keep Up With New Cases

Immigration Court dispositions are reaching record highs. In FY 2023, Court closures are on pace to grow to nearly half a million cases disposed of by Immigration Judges. Case dispositions in FY 2022 were a record 47 percent higher than the previous high set during FY 2019. During the first four months of FY 2023 (Oct 2022-Jan 2023), Court closures reached 172,180, 85 percent higher than a comparable period during 2019.

However, if the pace of new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) filings in Immigration Court continues, FY 2023 may also reach a new record for incoming cases. During the same four months of FY 2023, a total of 329,380 Notices to Appear (NTAs) issued by the DHS were recorded in Immigration Court case-by-case records. Thus, the Court is on pace this year to receive nearly a million new NTAs seeking to deport immigrants.

TRAC's full report is available here: https://trac.syr.edu/reports/709/.

 

-AK

Why Not a Humanitarian Climate Visa?

The latest episode on the Changing Climate, Changing Migration podcast of the Migration Policy Institute features Ama Francis, a climate displacement strategist with the International Refugee Assistance Project and Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

One interesting idea advocated by Ama Francis on the podcast is a Humanitarian Climate visa for climate displaced people from climate vulnerable areas. The visa could have two-step eligibility that asks, first, if the person is from an area particularly prone to climate impact. Second, the visa could evaluate vulnerability. As Francis points out, there is an example of such a visa from Argentina, which in 2022 approved a new humanitarian visa to enable people displaced regionally by climate disasters (in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean) to access the visa.

You can listen to the full episode here.

IE

Immigration Article of the Day: The Immigration Shadow Docket by Faiza W. Sayed

The Immigration Article of the Day is "The Immigration Shadow Docket" by Faiza W. Sayed, published here, in the Northwestern University Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

Each year, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)—the Justice Department’s appellate immigration agency that reviews decisions of immigration judges and decides the fate of thousands of noncitizens—issues about thirty published, precedential decisions. At present, these are the only decisions out of approximately 30,000 each year, that are readily available to the public and provide detailed reasoning for their conclusions. This is because most of the BIA’s decision-making happens on what this Article terms the “immigration shadow docket”—the tens of thousands of other decisions the BIA issues each year that are unpublished and nonprecedential. These shadow docket decisions are generally authored by a single BIA member and consist overwhelmingly of brief orders and summary affirmances. This Article demonstrates the harms of shadow docket decision-making, including the creation of “secret law” that is accessible to the government but largely inaccessible to the public. Moreover, this shadow docket produces inconsistent outcomes where one noncitizen’s removal order is affirmed while another noncitizen’s removal order is reversed—even though the deciding legal issues were identical. A 2022 settlement provides the public greater access to some unpublished BIA decisions, but it ultimately falls far short of remedying the transparency and accessibility concerns raised by the immigration shadow docket.

The BIA’s use of nonprecedential, unpublished decisions to dispose of virtually all cases also presents serious concerns for the development of immigration law. Because the BIA is the final arbiter of most immigration cases, it has a responsibility to provide guidance as to the meaning of our complicated immigration laws and to ensure uniformity in the application of immigration law across the nation. By publishing only 0.001% of its decisions each year, the BIA has all but abandoned that duty. This dereliction likely contributes to well-documented disparities in the application of immigration law by immigration adjudicators and the inefficiency of the immigration system that leaves noncitizens in protracted states of limbo and prolonged detention. This Article advances principles for reforms to increase transparency and fairness at the BIA, improve the quality, accuracy and political accountability of its decisions, and ensure justice for the nearly two million noncitizens currently in our immigration court system.

IE

Immigration Article of the Day: The End of California’s Anti-Asian Alien Land Law: A Case Study in Reparations and Transitional Justice

The Immigration Article of the Day is: "The End of California’s Anti-Asian Alien Land Law: A Case Study in Reparations and Transitional Justice" by Gabriel "Jack" Chin and Anna Ratner, published in 20 Asian American Law Journal 17 (2022) and available on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

For nearly a century, California law embodied a rabid anti-Asian policy, which included school segregation, discriminatory law enforcement, a prohibition on marriage with Whites, denial of voting rights, and imposition of many other hardships. The Alien Land Law was a California innovation, copied in over a dozen other states. The Alien Land Law, targeting Japanese but applying to Chinese, Koreans, South Asians, and others, denied the right to own land to noncitizens who were racially ineligible to naturalize, that is, who were not White or Black. After World War II, California’s policy abruptly reversed. Years before Brown v. Board of Education, California courts became leaders in ending Jim Crow. In 1951, the California legislature voluntarily voted to pay reparations to people whose land had been escheated under the Alien Land Law. This article describes the enactment and effect of the reparations laws. It also describes the surprisingly benevolent treatment by courts of lawsuits undoing the secret trusts and other arrangements for land ownership intended to evade the Alien Land Law. But ultimately, the Alien Land Law precedent may be melancholy. California has not paid reparations to other groups who also have conclusive claims of mistreatment. Reparations in part were driven by geopolitical concerns arising from the Cold War and the hot war in Korea. In addition, anti-Asian immigration policy had succeeded in halting Japanese and other Asian immigration to the United States. Accordingly, one explanation for this remarkable act was that there was room for generosity to a handful of landowners with no concern that the overall racial arrangement might be compromised.

IE

BIA's Reading Room for Unpublished Decisions is LIVE!

Check it out, the BIA's reading room for unpublished decisions is now live. Here is the link: https://foia.eoir.justice.gov/app/ReadingRoom.aspx. And here's the NYLAG press release:

Historic Settlement Levels the Legal Playing Field for Immigrant Advocates 

 

Immigrants, Immigration Lawyers Win Access to Secret Case Law 

 

NEW YORK – A federal district court in New York on Wednesday evening ordered the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals to establish an online library of its unpublished opinions – the result of a settlement between the New York Legal Assistance Group (NYLAG) and the U.S. Department of Justice. By giving immigrants and their lawyers full access to the Board’s opinions, the settlement will allow them to fight removal and other adverse actions with the same knowledge of case law that attorneys representing the government already have. Public Citizen Litigation Group served as lead counsel for NYLAG in the case, along with NYLAG’s own lawyers. 

“This historic settlement will change the practice of immigration law in this country,” said Beth Goldman, NYLAG president and attorney-in-charge. “After our crucial victory in the Second Circuit, the Board has agreed to stop keeping its decisions secret – a practice that, for years, has put immigrants at an unfair disadvantage when asserting their rights in court. Opening up these opinions to the public will finally help even the playing field between immigration advocates and their adversaries, and it will allow the dedicated immigration practitioners at NYLAG and around the country to do their best work advocating for their clients. We are pleased that the Board agreed to make this move toward transparency without the need for further litigation.” 

The Board of Immigration Appeals is the administrative body within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that adjudicates appeals from decisions made by immigration judges. Most of the Board’s tens of thousands of decisions each year are kept secret from the public. Only a handful of opinions are made publicly available online, and a small number of additional opinions are available in hard copy at a law library in Falls Church, Virginia. 

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires that agencies make all their opinions and orders available to the public over the internet, but the Board of Immigration Appeals has ignored this requirement for years and designated almost all the opinions it issues in immigration cases as unpublished. The case arose when NYLAG, which provides free legal services to immigrants in New York, requested that the Board post all of its opinions in immigration cases in its electronic reading room. When the request was denied, NYLAG and Public Citizen Litigation Group filed suit to require the Board to comply with the law.  

Under the settlement approved Wednesday, the Board will be required to place nearly all its opinions into an online reading room, accessible to all in perpetuity, ensuring that immigration advocates will have access to these opinions within six months of when they are issued. The Board also must post its decisions dating back to 2017 as well as some from 2016. Posting will begin in October and will be phased in over several years. The settlement ensures that NYLAG and Public Citizen will be able to monitor the Board’s compliance and, if problems arise, seek the help of the court.  

Public Citizen’s Scott Nelson, the lead attorney for NYLAG in the case, added: “This case is a tremendous advance for freedom of information in three ways. First, to get this far, we had to win a landmark decision in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals recognizing that people can sue under FOIA to force agencies to comply with their obligation to publish records online. Second, the online library that this case will create will be of great use to immigrants and their lawyers. Third, this settlement will help DOJ and its components serve as a model of FOIA compliance, as agencies devoted to the rule of law should be.” 

-KitJ

Immigration Article of the Day: Ten Years of Democratizing Data: Privileging Facts, Refuting Misconceptions and Examining Missed Opportunities (CMS)

Ten Years of Democratizing Data: Privileging Facts, Refuting Misconceptions and Examining Missed Opportunities is a new report from the Center for Migration Studies authored by Donald Kerwin and Robert Warren. Here's the abstract:

The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) initiated its “Democratizing Data” project in 2013 to make detailed demographic information widely available on the US undocumented, eligible to naturalize, and other non-citizen populations. The paper begins by outlining top-line findings and themes from the more than 30 CMS studies under this project. It then examines and refutes four persistent misconceptions that have inhibited public understanding and needed policy change: (1) migrants never leave the United States; (2) most undocumented migrants arrive by illegally crossing the US-Mexico border; (3) each Border Patrol apprehension translates into a new undocumented resident; and (4) immigrants are less skilled than US-born workers. The paper then offers new analyses in support of select policy recommendations drawn from a decade of democratizing data. It concludes with a short reflection and a case study on the failure of data, evidence-based policy ideas, and national ideals to translate into necessary reform.

-KitJ

Emerging Research on Canada's Detention System

A report by Olamide Olaniyan, titled "An Immigration Detention System That Makes No Sense," and appearing in The Tyee, features Efrat Arbel and Molly Joeck discussing why Canada’s treatment of migrants needs reform.

In the article, Professor Arbel describes an important new research project:

“The goal of this project is really to highlight those experiences that too often are left unknown and unexamined, because they take place in the so-called black box,” she said. “To bring these stories out of the darkness and into the light in order to demonstrate what I view to be fundamental problems with the legal regime as it is structured.”

The movement against immigration detention got a major win in July 2022 when the B.C. government announced it would be ending its arrangement with the Canada Border Services Agency that allowed immigration detainees to be kept in provincial jails. Arbel called the announcement “a moment of real hope in a regime that does not create many opportunities for hope.”

IE

U.S. Immigrants and Emigrants

WaPo and NYT have competing stories of great interest today.

The NYT reports that nearly 1 million migrants became U.S. citizens in 2022: a 15-year high. There are another 670,000 naturalization applications pending! The NYT article also clued me into changes coming w/r/t naturalization that hadn't been on my radar. Did you know that USCIS is redesigning the oral portion of the natz test? They plan to ask applicants "to describe three photographs of everyday activities, the weather or food" with the goal of testing "ordinary use of English."

Meanwhile, WaPo has an absolutely fascinating piece about U.S. emigration -- looking at where Americans land around the globe when the choose to leave this country. Do you know the largest receiving country? Go ahead. Take a moment to think. Yup, it's Mexico. And most of the Americans living in Mexico are children of Mexican citizens, so-called "accidental Americans." (Not sure how I feel about that particular moniker.) Where do others go? "Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, Australia and other advanced economies."

The WaPo article also has this wonderful nugget -- did you know that a number of Americans seek asylum overseas each year? How many, do you think? Turns out the number for 2022 was 426, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. (They also headed for Germany, the U.K. and Canada.)

Data regarding emigration is somewhat sketchy. As WaPo notes "The U.S. government does not keep a close count of Americans who have left the country; few governments do." The data cited in the article comes from a variety of sources -- researchers and international organizations.

-KitJ

Welcoming America in San Jose

Welcoming America convenes its interactive workshop from April 26-28 in San José, California. 

There will be 500 inclusion practitioners from around the world for networking opportunities, deep dive sessions, and powerful plenary presentations from thought leaders in the DEI space, and of course, our legendary city tours. 

A description of past Welcoming Interactives is here: 2022 recap. Sign-up and registration for the 2023 Welcome Interactive is here.

MHC

 

American or US citizen: Stanford language guide aims for inclusivity, ignites public debate

Stanford University's IT department released an internal guidance on the use of harmful language. Among other terms, they recommend the term "US citizen" instead of "American." Their reasoning is that the term American is overinclusive, and it overlooks Canadians, Central Americans, South Americans and other countries who are implied to be less important than the United States of America. 

Conservative media outlets, like the Washington Times, have decried the Stanford language guide as bending to wokeness and the specific guidance on "American" to be unpatriotic. Stanford has said that banning language is not their intent and clarified for the broader public that the guide is not a ban on language, nor is it endorsed by the university writ large. Steve Gallagher, Stanford chief information officer, said 

 “We have particularly heard concerns about the guide’s treatment of the term ‘American.’ We understand and appreciate those concerns. To be very clear, not only is the use of the term ‘American’ not banned at Stanford, it is absolutely welcomed.”

He continued by clarifying that the intent of this specific entry “was to provide perspective on how the term may be imprecise in some specific uses, and to show that in some cases the alternate term ‘U.S. citizen’ may be more precise and appropriate.”

Nevertheless, the public debate raises the question of whether US citizen is an inclusive term? Many Immprofs consider immigrants to be social or political members of communities, lending the term "American" an inclusive valence by recognizing identification with a community, not withstanding legal status. The status designation of "US citizen", in contrast, is the exclusive one, especially considering that legal designations of undocumented status can be inconclusive. In a related vein, critical race theorists express skepticism toward overemphasizing formal citizenship. Rose Cuison Villazor, in Rejecting Citizenship, elaborates on the point as a response to my book, Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era.  It is an issue of importance and one that I wrestle with in a new article, Colorblind Nationalism and the Limits of Citizenship, while trying to envision alternatives to the binary legal status imprinted on policies surrounding membership and belonging in America. In short, the language and terms of belonging for immigrants is complex terrain that extends beyond the point-counterpoint debates surrounding the Stanford language guide.

MHC

A Guide to Obtaining Detention Records: New Publication from the American Immigration Council and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration

The American Immigration Council and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) have published a new guide to help individuals who have been detained by immigration agencies and their advocates request records about their detention.

The guide walks individuals through the detention process and identifies the agencies that maintain documents and information about an individual’s detention, including oversight components of DHS that receive complaints from detained individuals.

This step-by-step guide is intended to help demystify the process of getting documents from federal agencies under FOIA for people who have been detained and answer some of the questions inherent in the process.

IE

Podcast: Belonging in Unceded Territory

ImmigrationProf Blog readers in the US may be interested in the intersection of migration, settler colonialism and indigeneity. Leading scholars have collaborated on a Global Migration Podcast episode featuring a Vancouver-based research collaboration, Belonging in Unceded Territory. You can access the episode here, where you will also find links to Spotify or other preferred listening platforms.

MHC (h/t Antje Ellermann, Founding Director Centre for Migration Studies)

Caught in the Web: The Role of Transnational Data Sharing in the U.S. Immigration System

Today the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) released a new policy report on the role of foreign data sharing programs in the U.S. immigration system.

“Caught in the Web” presents the result of an in-depth investigation into the ways that data sharing between the United States and foreign governments interacts with immigration enforcement programs.

Surveying NIJC’s legal teams and legal service providers throughout the country, the investigation reveals how immigration decisionmakers routinely rely on faulty information to determine the fate of immigrants seeking safety or immigration status in the United States.

The policy brief also highlights people directly impacted by foreign data sharing, including 11-year-old Felipe, who CBP separated from his parents at the border in May and who still remains separated today. 

IE

Immigration Article of the Day: How States Can Play a Role in Abolishing Immigration Prisons by Yuri Han and Katrina Landeta

The Immigration Article of the Day is How States Can Play a Role in Abolishing Immigration Prisons by Yuri Han and Katrina Landeta, published in volume 38 of the Chicanx-Latinx Law Review and available here.

Here is the abstract:

On October 11, 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the strictest ban on private prisons in the country. California Assembly Bill (AB) 32 would phase out all privately-run prisons, including immigration prisons, by 2028. As the first prison abolition legislation of its kind in the United States, AB 32 brought to light the mounting concern regarding the cruel nature of immigrant detention as well as increasing outrage over serious abuses at for-profit prisons.

This article is the first to explore this landmark legislation and analyze its legal and policy implications in the movement for immigrant prison abolition. After setting forth a brief history on the growth of private detention, this article discusses AB 32’s pathway through the courts. The article concludes by arguing that AB 32 can serve as an important illustration for other states where federal action has fallen short. While in 2021 President Biden signed an executive order to end Department of Justice contracts with private prisons for criminal detention, the order did not apply to immigration detention. States can adopt legislation like AB 32 to play a role in eradicating immigrant prisons across the country.

IE