Immigration Blog

Dear Rep. Hoyer:

It has come to my attention that recently, in an attempt to dissuade a federal official from making himself available for discussion and public questioning at a forum, you reviled the hosting organization using a variety of smears borrowed from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

If the Americans win one or more of these cases, maybe that will prod some governmental agency — I think it could be done at either the federal or the state level — to take action against these obviously discriminatory practices.

Ensuring compliance with the immigration laws requires the executive branch to use all of the tools at its disposal to induce aliens to follow the law. Enforcement of the criminal penalties in section 266 of the INA should be the first step in that effort.

If the Second Circuit makes the cardinal error of granting Ragbir relief from the immigration laws based on this curious (dare I say spurious?) argument, virtually every deportable alien possessed of his letters will overnight become an activist pundit, sending op-eds and screeds to any written or online publication willing to entertain them, simply so as to shoehorn himself, too, into protection from the consequences of his immigration law violations.

If the status of DACA is complicated now for the federal government (and in particular U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), one can only imagine how much more complicated conflicting district court orders will make it. And Judge Hanen's order can come at any time, meaning that a Supreme Court with only eight justices may have to quickly rule on the legality of the program, as Noah Feldman explained recently in Bloomberg Opinion. When it comes to DACA, uncertainty abounds.

I am left with the observation that drafting a good prison or sentencing reform bill is much akin to threading a needle: Aim wide, and you are sure to fail. With carefully re-crafted language, this bill could have been excised of those provisions that potentially will permit thousands of alien felon prisoners to sidestep the reach of federal immigration officials attempting to take them into custody from the Bureau of Prisons in order to deport them. And such amendments would have done no harm whatsoever to the aim of prison and sentencing reform for deserving American prisoners.

Sometimes a citizen child can save his or her illegal alien parent from deportation, on the grounds that the deportation of the parent would create an undue hardship on the child. For example, if the illegal alien parent is the sole source of the family's income or the child has a medical condition that is unlikely to be treated in the parent's home country.

How did we get here? How did one of America's oldest and most highly respected environmental organizations stray so far from their original outlook? It involves activists, changes in leadership, and big money. Here is a brief chronology of how the Sierra Club retreated from its views on population stabilization and immigration.

This U visa program has morphed from a sensible, small-scale activity designed to help law enforcement agencies when working with illegals into a huge, largely hidden, backdoor amnesty program. It is another of the cluster of programs that provide large numbers of green cards to aliens not because there is a national need for their presence, or even because of relatives already here, but just because of luck.

Investigating the smugglers and screening their clients are two distinct operations that work in tandem. The screening at the border improves the chances of knowing if a given SIA poses a terrorism problem and, at the same time, can produce intelligence information ICE-HSI can use to go after smugglers. ICE-HSI does these investigations in joint partnership with the Justice Department's Criminal Division under the Extraterritorial Criminal Travel Strike Force program.