By Huyen Pham & Pham Hoang Van.

As the Biden Administration decides whether to continue the 287(g) program (the controversial program deputizing local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws), our research shows that the program has broader negative effects on policing behavior than previously identified. To date, debate about the 287(g) program has focused exclusively on the policing behavior of law enforcement agencies like sheriff’s offices that sign the agreements, and on concerns that these signatory local enforcement agencies (“LEAs”) engage in racial profiling. Our research shows that the agreements also negatively affect the behavior of nearby, non-signatory law enforcement agencies. Using 18 million traffic stops drawn from the Stanford Open Policing Project, we find that the agreements caused state troopers in North Carolina and South Carolina to stop Hispanic drivers more often than White drivers, in order to funnel them into the intensive immigration screening conducted by signatory LEAs at the shared jails. Because trooper agencies did not sign the agreements, statistical associations between the presence of agreements and the differential treatment of drivers by race are not contaminated by unobserved confounding factors. Our identification of these previously unnoticed spillover effects raises important policy questions about the program’s impact and the adequacy of existing legal and administrative controls.

Arizona Law Review, 2022. 41p.

By JULIET P. STUMPF 

Crimmigration law—the intersection of immigration and criminal law—with its emphasis on immigration enforcement, has been central in discussions over political compromise on immigration reform. Yet crimmigration law’s singular approach to interior immigration and criminal law enforcement threatens to undermine public faith in the legitimacy of immigration law. This Article explores the significance of crimmigration for the procedural legitimacy of immigration law. Seminal scholars of psychological jurisprudence have concluded that perceptions about procedural justice—whether the law and legal authorities treat people fairly—are often more important than a favorable outcome, such as winning a case or avoiding arrest. Crimmigration introduces procedural deficiencies into immigration law that may undermine people’s perceptions of its legitimacy. These deficiencies, seen through the lens of psychological jurisprudence, mean that individuals and institutions are less likely to trust immigration law and cooperate with immigration authorities. This Article applies specific criteria that jurisprudential psychologists have shown influence perceptions about justice. It predicts that the core procedural deficiencies of crimmigration—which bar access to immigration benefits, undermine procedural safeguards for fair and accurate outcomes, and embed racialization into immigration enforcement—will undermine perceptions about the legitimacy of immigration law. This has important implications for immigration reform. If immigration enforcement lacks procedural justice, any compromise struck with crimmigration at its core will exacerbate public distrust of immigration law.

Arizona Law Review, 2023. 47p.

By Elizabeth Hannah

Immigration detention is a central feature of the United States’ immigration system. Noncitizens facing removal are detained in staggering numbers throughout the removal process, from the initiation of legal proceedings to the issuance of a final removal order. Moreover, as the U.S. government’s reliance upon immigration detention has grown, the Supreme Court has systematically stripped noncitizens of important substantive and procedural protections. This is especially true in the post-removal-order context, where a series of recent decisions have placed more people than ever at risk of prolonged detention without a bond hearing. Three cases in particular—Johnson v. Guzman Chavez (2021), Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez (2022), and Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez (2022)—have increased the likelihood that noncitizens subject to post-removal-order detention will remain incarcerated for months or years, even if they have pending claims for relief. This Note describes each of these three cases and explains how, together, they severely undermine the rights of noncitizens with final removal orders. This Note further argues that people facing post-removal-order detention should be entitled to rigorous due process protections. Even though detention constitutes a clear deprivation of liberty, the Supreme Court has held that six months of post-removal-order detention is “presumptively reasonable.” This Note criticizes that premise and asserts that no period of immigration detention is presumptively reasonable. In other words, even if the Court had decided Guzman Chavez, Arteaga-Martinez, and Aleman Gonzalez in favor of the noncitizen plaintiffs, the existing framework would still be insufficient to protect immigrants in post-removal-order detention from experiencing protracted and unnecessary trauma. This Note therefore posits that, at minimum, immigrants with final removal orders should receive a bond hearing before an immigration judge at the close of the 90-day mandatory detention period. While more radical solutions like detention abolition are ultimately in order, a 90-day bond hearing requirement would at least provide noncitizens facing post-removal-order detention a meaningful opportunity to secure release from custody.

Arizona Law Review, 2023. 36p.

By Chase Childress, Amy Farrella, Shawn Bhimani, and Kayse Lee Maass

Law enforcement interventions continue to be the primary mechanism used to identify offenders and illicit businesses involved in human trafficking, yet trafficking continues to be a thriving international operation. We explore alternative mechanisms to disrupt illicit operations and reduce victimization through labor trafficking supply chains using supply chain disruption theory. Using a case study approach to examine one federally prosecuted labor trafficking case in the agricultural sector, we (1) extend criminological concepts of disruption by identifying sources and methods of disruption and (2) inform criminal justice system responses by presenting novel methods of assessing effectiveness of anti-human trafficking policies and programs.

Victims & Offenders, 2022. 39p.

By Nicole Ward and Jeanne Batalova

The United States is in the midst of an historic period in its immigration history, facing a changing composition of the immigrant population, pandemic-related pent-up demand for permanent and temporary visas resulting in extensive backlogs, record pressure at the U.S.-Mexico border, and somewhat decreasing public support for expanded immigration. Legal permanent and temporary immigration rose in 2022 after a few years of chill brought about by the COVID-19 public-health crisis and the Trump administration’s restrictive policies and rhetoric. Amid crises around the world, the Biden administration extended or expanded Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain eligible immigrants already in the United States and announced special humanitarian parole programs allowing some migrants from several countries to enter the United States and stay temporarily. At the southwest border, record numbers of migrant encounters in 2022 accompanied court orders preventing the Biden administration from revoking the Title 42 public-health order authorizing the rapid expulsion of asylum seekers and other migrants. The administration has proposed a revised system to govern asylum at the border, but as of this writing the situation remains in flux. To promote orderly arrival and processing of asylum seekers and expedite the expulsion of unauthorized migrants, in January 2023 the Biden administration announced another humanitarian parole program to include up to 30,000 authorized newcomers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela every month if they have a U.S. sponsor. This program was followed by controversial proposed changes to U.S. asylum system. Worldwide, the United States is home to more international migrants than any other country, and more than the next four countries—Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—combined, according to the UN Population Division’s mid-2020 data. While the U.S. population represents about 5 percent of the total world population, close to 20 percent of all global migrants reside in the United States. This Spotlight offers information about the approximately 45.3 million immigrants in the United States as of 2021, by compiling the most authoritative and current data available. It provides an overview of historic immigration trends in the United States, sociodemographic information about who is immigrating, through which channels, and how many immigrants become naturalized citizens. It also provides data on the government’s enforcement actions and adjudication efforts to process visas.

Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2023. 34p.

By Robert Warren.

This report describes estimates of the undocumented population residing in the United States in 2022 compiled by CMS. The estimates are based on data collected in the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the US Census Bureau.

The report finds that the undocumented population grew from 10.3 million in 2021 to 10.9 million in 2022, an increase of 650,000. The increase reverses more than a decade of gradual decline. The undocumented populations from 10 countries increased by a total of 525,000. The report explains why undocumented population growth is much less than the number of apprehensions by the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, the Appendix provides a detailed description of the CMS methodology.

The report includes the following topline findings:

• After remaining at or near zero growth from 2010 to 2021, the US undocumented population increased by 650,000 in 2022.

• The largest population gains in 2022 were for Central America (205,000), South America (200,000), and Asia (140,000).

• From 2015 to 2022, the undocumented population from Mexico declined by 1.3 million; in the same period, the combined population from Central and South America increased by 1.2 million.

The report describes changes in the US undocumented population by country of origin and state of residence since 2018 with special emphasis on changes from 2021 to 2022. The rapid increase in annual apprehensions and expulsions of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border that began in 2019 has dominated media attention on migration for the past four years. That, in turn, has focused attention on the prospect of large annual increases in the undocumented population. Unfortunately, ACS data needed to monitor changes in the population are not available until about a year after the ACS survey is completed. The unique CMS methodology made it possible to derive these estimates less than two months after the release of 2022 ACS data.

By Christian Gunadi

The implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 grants undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children a temporary reprieve from deportation and authorization to work legally, potentially increasing their opportunity costs of committing crimes. In this article, I examine the impact of DACA on crime. The analysis yields a few main results. First, at the individual level, comparing the difference in the likelihood of being incarcerated between DACA-eligible population with its counterpart before and after the implementation of DACA, I fail to find evidence that DACA statistically significantly affected the incarceration rate of undocumented youth. This result is robust to controlling for the differences in characteristics associated with DACA eligibility, such as age and age at arrival. Second, using the variation in the number of DACA applications approved across the U.S. states, the evidence suggests that DACA is associated with a reduction in property crime rates. An increase of one DACA application approved per 1,000 population is associated with a 1.6% decline in overall property crime rate. Further analysis shows that this reduction is driven by the decline in burglary and larceny rates. This finding suggests that policies that expand the employment opportunities of immigrants may reduce crimes committed for financial gains that often do not lead to incarceration.

Unpublished paper, 2020. 61p,