Immigration Blog

Last week, the United States and Mexico cohosted the Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America in Miami. While the question of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was not on the agenda, both Honduras and El Salvador took the opportunity to highlight the issue before U.S. officials.

Most readers know that the "travel ban" and sanctuary lawsuits were filed by various entities, including a few states, against executive orders (EOs) issued by President Trump to pause entry into the United States from nationals of certain countries; and to cease providing federal grants to

My colleague, Andrew "Art" Arthur has written a series of blogs on a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report discussing the sobering state of affairs at the Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review (DOJ EOIR), which is responsible for administering the immigration courts and their appellate tribunal, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). (See here, here, and here.) The blogs describe the problems that confront EOIR and, therefore, the government generally, in attempting to handle the overwhelming number of removal cases (and requests by alien respondents for relief from removal that are heard as a corollary to those cases). After all, a massive backlog in the immigration systems constitutes the equivalent of a giant cork in the government's entire effort to regulate and control illegal immigration. Arthur's postings are timely, and not just because of the GAO report. Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) has issued its own findings that post-date the GAO audit, and reveal that the backlog continues to build. As of the end of May, it had reached nearly 600,000: a 100,000 case increase in the last 12 months alone.

Last week the New York Times published a fine obituary for a remarkable man, Robert Leiken, who died June 7 at the age of 78. I want to make a personal tribute to Bob Leiken. We had a friendship that began about 20 years ago, when he was a scholar at the Nixon Center and I was a reporter in Washington.