Citizenship Service Learning: Becoming Citizens by Assisting Immigrants

Citizenship Service Learning (CSL) serves to reinforce the strengths inherent in the traditional principles of higher education while concurrently transcending its limitations. CSL principles are celebrated on two grounds. The first is pedagogical. Following liberal arts traditionalists, CSL adheres to the class- room as a site for developing cognitive skills through accumulating information and learning research methods. It then stretches the learning process into the civic arena, where students gain tools in problem solving, critical thinking, leadership, and team work through the experience of working with immigrants

Injustice and the Disappearance of Discretionary Detention under Trump: Detaining Low Risk Immigrants without Bond

This Report demonstrates that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violates legal requirements to provide immigrants with an individualized custody determination. Trump’s enforcement policies brought a surge of low-risk immigrants into ICE custody. The detention risk tool was supposed to train officers and strongly discourage them from detaining low-risk immigrants who posed no harm to society and were not a flight risk. Data received pursuant to FOIA show the opposite result. ICE has failed to perform the individualized assessment and restrict its use of civil detention to only those whose high levels of dangerousness and risk of flight justify their incarceration. The data show that officers have manipulated the risk tool by subjecting low-risk immigrants to blanket detention, which has come to define the no-release Trump immigration policy in the New York City area

Manipulating Risk: Immigration Detention through Automation

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security arrests as many as 500,000 migrants per year and detains more than 350,000 of them through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since 2012, ICE has relied on an automated Risk Classification Assessment (RCA) system to recommend whom to detain and whom to release. The authors are the first to obtain access to its algorithm and this Article is the first to make that system’s methodology public. While purportedly basing these recommendations on indicia offlight risk and risk to public safety, the RCA in fact relies on an algorithm driven by political preferences. By linking detention to enforcement policy rather than risk, the RCA lost its underpinning in the Constitution. In addition, compromises in its logic thwarted the program’s ability to deliver the harm reduction, transparency, and uniformity it promised. Ultimately, our data and analysis reveal that manipulation of the RCA resulted in automated detention recommendations for hundreds of thousands of people in violation of the Constitution. The RCA thus delivers mass incarceration of immigrants with staggering efficiency. In the end, we argue the RCA supplied a veneer of risk to a tool of punishment

Media Literacy Teacher Talk: Interpretation, Value, and Implementation

This paper analyzes how 10 teachers in a literacy master’s program interpret, value, and implement media literacy education following a semester-long course. Interview data are analyzed using the Belenky et al’s Women’s Ways of Knowing framework. While all participants valued what they understood media literacy to mean, some confused ML with technology. Implementation reflected participants’ varied understandings. Some participants integrated ML into existing units, which lead students to critical analysis and creation of media. Findings suggest 3 challenges for ML educators: contextual limitations and restrictions, ML content knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge

Using Risk to Assess the Legal Violence of Mandatory Detention

Immigration mandatory detention is a particularly harsh example of the structural violence embedded in immigration enforcement. It deprives liberty without bond for immigrants with prior crimes, and assigns many individuals to the harsh conditions associated with unnecessary and even wrongful detention. Mandatory detention has been justified on the grounds that mandatory detainees are a danger to public safety. This article puts to the test this presumption of dangerousness among mandatory detainees, and finds, to the contrary, that immigrants with prior charges or convictions are no more dangerous than any other category of individuals in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Using the risk classification assessment (RCA) tool, which the author is the first to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act, the article contributes to the growing criticism of mandatory detention, providing evidence that many of those in mandatory detention should probably have never been detained

COVID-19 and the Creeping Necropolitics of Crimmigration Control

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a drastic impact on migration and migrants and immigration policies worldwide [...