• USCIS looking to fill 1,000 positions in response to Obama’s executive order

    An internal memo from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) notes that the federal government is seeking to fill 1,000 full-time permanent and temporary positions at a new “operational center” in Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia, in response to the Obama administration’s executive actions to allow some five million undocumented immigrants have their deportation deferred, apply for driver’s licenses in most states, and apply for two-year work permits.

  • Undocumented immigrants can now practice law in Florida

    On 20 November, Jose Godinez-Samperio took the oath of admission to the Florida Bar, but unlike many lawyers before him, Godinez-Samperio was not a U.S. citizen.The state legislature amended an existing family law bill to allow would-be lawyers like Godinez-Samperio to practice law in Florida.

  • Obama’s executive action may divert resources from handling legal immigrants

    Critics of President Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration are worried that shifting immigration resources from work done on behalf of legal immigrants to applications filed by those in the country illegally would discourage future immigrants from entering the United States legally.A former federal immigration official compares the new immigration effort to the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program (DACA), which drew more than 600,000 applications from Dreamers.One of the effects of DACA was an increase in the wait time for green cards for immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens from five months to fifteen months, which critics blame on personnel being diverted to work on the DACA program.

  • New deportation approach targets convicted criminals, threats to national security

    Last Thursday, President Barack Obama announced the end of Secure Communitiesas part of his immigration reform strategy. The program was designed to identify deportable undocumented immigrants who had committed crimes, by allowing federal immigration agents to access fingerprint records collected at local jails. In many cases, agents requested local law enforcement officials to hold inmates beyond their jail terms until they could be transferred to federal custody. Obama has announced a new initiative — the Priority Enforcement Program— to target only undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of certain serious crimes or who pose danger to national security.

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  • Number of unaccompanied children crossing into U.S. declines sharply

    The number of unaccompanied children apprehended by federal agents along the U.S.-Mexico border last October was down by 40 percent compared with October 2013. In the nine sectors of the Southwest border from California to Texas, federal border officials apprehended 2,529 children last October, down from 4,181 in October 2013. Family apprehensions also decreased about 10 percent — from 2,414 in October 2013 to 2,163 in October 2014.

  • Immigration advocates say CBP uses "expedited removal" to deport asylum seekers

    A new complaint to the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties charge sthat U.S. Customs and Border Protection(CBP) agents routinely ignore asylum seekers’ claim of fear of prosecution in their homeland, a claim which could grant them asylum in the United States. The complaint further states that CBP officers are increasingly using “expedited removal” to deport illegal immigrants. Unlike conventional deportation, expedited removal occurs outside of the judicial process. The number of expedited removal orders more than doubled in less than a decade from 72,911 in 2005 to 193,092 in 2013.

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  • Obama’s executive order will shield 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation

    In the face of bitter protests from Republicans in Congress, President Obama will soon announce that he will be using executive orders to launch a broad overhaul of the U.S. immigration enforcement system. One of the immediate results of the overhaul would be to shield up to five million undocumented immigrants – nearly half of the estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States — from the threat of deportation. The president’s orders will also provide many of these undocumented immigrants with work permits.

  • Data indicate there is no immigration crisis

    Is there an “immigration crisis” on the U.S.-Mexico border? Not according to an examination of historical immigration data, according to a new study. The paper examines historical immigration data, the “push” and “pull” factors currently motivating Mexicans and Central Americans to migrate to the United States and attempts to explain why current undocumented immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border has been perceived as a crisis.

  • As U.K. elections approach, immigration debate simmers

    As the 2015 British Parliamentary elections approach, increasing attention is focused on current immigration issues and attitudes in the kingdom, especially by right-leaning politicians.Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to reduce overall migration to the country to less than 100,000 people a year by 2015, including migrants from within the European Union, but critics, including business and academic leaders, say such a goal is unrealistic and undesirable.

  • Los Angeles County to cooperate with ICE on detaining undocumented immigrants

    The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisorsvoted Tuesday to extend 287(g), a program which allows federal immigration agents to train county jail employees to investigate whether certain inmates convicted of serious crimes are in the country illegally. Inmates confirmed as undocumented immigrants are then transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) detention centers after serving their sentence.Aroud the country, at least 225 law enforcement agencies have decided to refuse hold requests from ICE.

  • More law enforcement agencies refuse to hold undocumented inmates for ICE

    Recent court rulings have emboldened roughly 225 law enforcement agencies across the country to refuse requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) officials to hold undocumented inmates past their release dates so federal authorities can have time to deport them. Until recently, inmates suspected of being in the country illegally were held for an additional forty-eight hours until ICE agents arrived. Some municipalities began limiting the number of holds a few years ago, but several counties and cities have begun to ignore the requests all together after recent court rulings confirmed that the immigration holds are not mandatory.

  • In U.S. criminal courts, non-citizens face harsher sentencing than citizens

    Non-Americans in the U.S. federal court system are more likely to be sentenced to prison and for longer terms compared to U.S. citizens, according to a new study. The researchers analyzed U.S. federal district court data from 1992 to 2008 for this study. In 2008, for example, 96 percent of convicted non-citizens received a prison sentence, compared to 85 percent of U.S. citizens. The researchers said that the issue of punishment disparities between citizens and non-citizens is a growing concern as the number of non-citizens in the United States — estimated at more than twenty-two million — continues to grow.

  • Most temporarily released undocumented immigrants fail to report

    Since October 2013, approximately 60,000 Central American families, mostly women and children, have crossed the U.S.-Mexican border. Many have been detained and housed in federal immigration detention facilities, but when facilities reached their capacity earlier this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities began to release tens of thousands of immigrants to temporarily reside with their relatives in the United States. About 70 percent of immigrant – or 41,000 — failed to report back to immigration officials fifteen days after their release date as instructed to.

  • Tension between humanitarian ideals, fear of terrorism in European asylum decisions

    New research has found that European states that experienced a terrorist attack on their own soil since 1980 were less likely to grant asylum to refugees. The study also found, however, that on the whole, concerns over terrorism in Europe have not eroded underpinnings of the Geneva Convention’s principles regarding asylum admission.

  • Immigration hearings hampered by remote technology glitches, raising constitutional issues

    The are currently nearly 400,000 pending deportation cases, shared among just 230 immigration judges in fifty-nine courtrooms. Immigration cases in the southern United States are encountering increasing delays and hardships due to the necessity of having to rely on wireless and mobile technology in order to have proper communication in the courtroom. Some even worry that the problems with the systems in place, including interpreters using teleconference equipment to translate large statements at a time, may be used in appeals on grounds that it is unconstitutional.