Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment

Only recently has imprisonment become a central feature of both t across every level of government and involving civil and criminal law enforcement tools. Examining the population as a whole provides crucial insights as to how we arrived at this state of mass immigration imprisonment. While political motivations — parallel to those that fueled the rapid expansion of criminal mass incarceration — may have started the trend, this Article demonstrates that key legal and policy choices explain how imprisonment has become an entrenched feature of immigration law enforcement. In fact, legislators and immigration officials have locked themselves into this choice, as there are now literally billions of dollars, tens of thousands of prison beds, and innumerable third parties invested in maintaining and expanding the use of immigration imprisonment. Using the literature on path dependence and legal legitimacy, this Article explains the phenomenon of immigration imprisonment as a single category that spans all levels of government. Rather than continue further along this path, the Article concludes by suggesting that policymakers should seek a future reflective of immigration law enforcement’s past when imprisonment was the exception rather than the norm

Immigration Law by Proxy: The Case of Colorado’s Human Smuggling Crime

Despite the federal government’s well known expansive reach in creating and enforcing immigration law, the states retain substantial authority to play an important role in migrants’ lives. Through their traditional powers to adopt criminal statutes and police their communities, states can indirectly — but intentionally — inject themselves into the incidents of ordinary life as a migrant. Colorado’s human smuggling statute, currently being challenged before the state supreme court, illustrates this type of state regulation of migration. This essay addresses the statute’s reach, its shaky constitutional footing, and places it in a broader context in which states criminalize immigration-related activity

The Perverse Logic of Immigration Detention: Unraveling the Rationality of Imprisoning Immigrants Based on Markers of Race and Class Otherness

In an effort to explain the massive growth of immigration imprisonment, this Essay explores the use of race and class as tools for policing immigration law. The Essay does this by contemplating the effect of an immigration law scheme that, at its most fundamental, requires sorting desirable immigrants from undesirable immigrants, and that, in recent years, has accomplished this sorting through increased reliance on criminal records. Placing these two features of contemporary immigration law within the context of two decades-old forms of indisputably racialized policing—mass incarceration of black and brown people for criminal law violations and the Supreme Court's sanctioning of racial profiling in immigration law policing—the Essay concludes that it was inevitable for penal imprisonment trends to taint immigration law enforcement with raced and classed mass incarceration

The Life of Crimmigration Law

This short essay introduces a collection of articles that arose from the Denver University Law Review’s symposium Crimmigration: Crossing the Border Between Criminal Law and Immigration Law, held in February 2015 at the University ofDenver Sturm College of Law. The essay borrows heavily from the Epilogue to my book Crimmigration Law