Archive for April, 2015
Every day in immigration courts around the country, people facing deportation try to explain why they should be allowed to remain in the United States under our notoriously complex immigration laws. Those who have legal representation rely on their attorneys to follow procedures and make arguments that may be virtually indecipherable to people without legal […]
On June 7, 2010, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, a fifteen-year-old Mexican national, was playing with a group of friends on the Mexican side of the border near the Paso del Norte Bridge in El Paso, Texas. The boy and his friends were playing a game in which they ran up the incline of a cement […]
The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing entitled “Birthright Citizenship: Is It The Right Policy For America?” The hearing will question whether those born in America will automatically be citizens, as they have been for over 150 years. Undoubtedly, the hearing will feature the same counterproductive anti-immigrant rhetoric that nativists have trotted out before, […]
Estrella is a four-year-old girl who has been locked-up in U.S. detention centers for over eight months or one fifth of her life. She is chronically ill and has been hospitalized for acute bronchitis. She has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, adjustment disorder with anxiety, and major depressive episode. Her mother, Melida, watches her […]
On Thursday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske answered questions from the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee regarding CBP’s budget, and more generally his first year on the job. Kerlikowske’s seeming rationality, and openness to administrative changes, provided an alternative to the enforcement-first strategy that has marked Congress’ approach to border security. […]
In the absence of meaningful immigration reform to address the situation of the millions of undocumented individuals living in the United States, state policies have become more and more important. One of the areas in which that is especially true is public health. It is unquestionable that healthy communities require broad access to health care. However, for […]
Since 2009, Congress has instructed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to maintain 34,000 beds in immigrant detention facilities across the country, a policy known as “the bed mandate.” This mandate costs the American taxpayer $5.05 million per day–or $159 a day per immigrant detainee. A new report released this week by Grassroots Leadership […]
Undocumented immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy in many ways. They fill essential jobs, they sustain U.S. businesses through their purchase of goods and services, and they pay taxes to federal, state, and local governments. Their contributions would be even greater if they had a chance to earn legal status and didn’t have the danger […]
In cities and states across the country, there has been growing momentum towards building better immigrant and refugee integration programs . Yet there hasn’t been an official federal immigrant integration strategy until now. Last week, the White House Task Force on New Americans—an interagency effort to develop a coordinated federal strategy to better integrate newcomers […]
This week, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) became the latest candidate to announce his 2016 presidential bid, which he did from the Freedom Tower in Miami, Florida. Known as the Ellis Island of the South, Freedom Tower served Cuban refugees seeking political asylum from 1962-1974 and his presence there sought to highlight his immigrant roots, his […]
