Immigration Blog

The Supreme Court issued today a per curiam order, in which it agreed to the government's request for certiorari and partially granted the government's application to stay preliminary injunctions in two recent circuit court decisions that enjoined, in part, provisions of Executive Order 13,780, captioned "Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrori

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week on the growth of the MS-13 gang and the nexus to immigration enforcement failures, a senior Department of Justice official strongly rebuffed assertions by two senators asserting that cooperation between local police and ICE causes immigrants to fear reporting crimes.

Two recent events prompted me to think about the use of nomenclature in immigration law.

One was a tweet criticizing a colleague for using the word "alien". The second was my review of Moncrieffe v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 1678 (2013), a case involving the application of the term "aggravated felony" under section 101(a)(43)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Even though the election is more than a year away, the issue of immigration has come up repeatedly in the Tennessee governor's race. To put this debate into context, the Center for Immigration Studies has analyzed recent government data on employment in the state.

On June 21, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the activities of the infamous Salvadoran gang MS-13. Their presence in the United States has raised alarm as they have engulfed local communities in bloodshed and crime. One need look no further than their motto — "kill, rape, control" — to understand why the presence of MS-13 in the United States is dangerous.

My colleague Nayla Rush has written a series of items on President Trump's decision to accept from Australia migrants who have been detained in offshore detention centers rather than allowing them to enter that nation. (See here, here, and here).

On Thursday, June 22, 2017, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Maslenjak v. United States.

With an issue as sensitive and complicated as immigration, emotion and confusion are bound to cloud the complexities of the debate. There is no shortage of lenses through which to view the topic, from libertarianism to compassionate liberalism, from pragmatic enforcement to hawkish neoconservatism. And no shortage of actual immigration areas upon which to focus those lenses: border security, visa issuance and overstays, interior enforcement, refugee, or asylum seeking, to name a few.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed yet another suit against yet another EB-5 lawyer, contending that the Chicago lawyer in the case, Seyed Taher Kameli, "improperly commingled and otherwise improperly used portions of the $88.7 million investment ... and has spent a significant portion of the investment proceeds for his own benefit."

Once again it looks like a highly questionable educational institution in Northern Virginia is about to be closed down — it is said to provide lots of nonimmigrant visas and not much education — and the closing will not be forced by the federal agency that is supposed to handle such things, the Department of Homeland Security.