Barriers to Representation for Detained Immigrants Facing Deportation: Varick Street Detention Facility, A Case Study

There is an evolving crisis in the immigration courts and federal courts of appeals caused by the lack of quality representation for immigrants facing deportation. The problem is particularly acute for immigrants who are detained during their removal proceedings. As part of the Study Group on Immigrant Representation (Katzmann study group), the Subcommittee on Enhancing Mechanisms for Service Delivery undertook a case study of the institutional and legal barriers to quality legal representation for immigrants held at the Varick Street Detention Facility in New York City. Through this lens we hope to offer some useful insights into the core factors contributing to the immigration representation crisis, the institutional barriers that aggravate the crisis, and, finally, to propose a series of reforms to address the crisis

Agriculture and the Food System: A Short History and Country Case Study in Mongolia

This paper includes a brief history of the human food system. It includes an exploration of the formation of the food system, the development of the modernized food and agriculture system, and challenges arisen throughout. Additionally, a specific case study into Mongolia and the unique geography of its food system is highlighted. The purpose of providing the case study is to consider challenges of a food system in transition amidst development in one country. Recommendations for Mongolia anent sustainable development are provided

Prosecutorial Discretion Power at its Zenith: The Power to Protect Liberty

On November 20, 2014, President Obama, frustrated by congressional inaction on immigration, announced an ambitious and potentially transformative prosecutorial discretion policy to forego the deportations of millions of low priority undocumented immigrants. That announcement immediately sparked legal challenges, which quickly wound their way to the Supreme Court, and a nationwide debate about the limits of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority. President Obama’s actions are part of a larger trend whereby modern presidents have increasingly used robust assertions of prosecutorial discretion powers to achieve policy goals that they could not realize through legislation. There are clear dangers in allowing a president to wield excessive prosecutorial discretion power. Taken to an extreme, in the context of the vast modern administrative state, a president could significantly undermine the will of Congress across a wide array of subject areas and, thereby, upset the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution. This legitimate concern has led some to argue that a president should not be permitted to exercise prosecutorial discretion categorically or based on her own normative view of the public interest. Categorical normative prosecutorial discretion policies pose the greatest risk of infringing on Congress’ primary policy making role; however, excising normative judgments and agency wide policies is entirely unworkable. The core purposes of prosecutorial discretion — justice, mercy and societal utility — all necessarily require the President to make independent judgments about the wisdom of prosecution. Limiting prosecutorial discretion to case-by-case determinations would be at odds with historic and modern practice and would significantly undermine the institutional design goals of transparency, uniformity and accountability. This Article suggests a new way to think about the boundaries of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority. Specifically, I propose that the nature of prosecutorial discretion power is dependent on the context of enforcement and that the power is at its zenith when a president exercises her discretion to protect physical liberty. It is in the liberty deprivation context where historical precedent, the Constitution’s structural bias against liberty deprivation and the textual sources of prosecutorial discretion powers all militate in favor of robust presidential powers as a necessary check against excessively punitive statutory schemes

Abolish ICE . . . and Then What?

In recent years, activists and then politicians began calling for the abolition of the United States’s interior immigration-enforcement agency: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many people have misinterpreted the call to “Abolish ICE” as merely a spontaneous rhetorical device used to express outrage at the current Administration’s brutal immigration policies. In fact, abolishing ICE is the natural extension of years of thoughtful organizing by a loose coalition of grassroots immigrant-rights groups. These organizations are serious, not only about their literal goal to eliminate the agency, but also about not replacing it with another dedicated agency of immigration police. Accordingly, the proposal to eliminate ICE necessarily raises the question of how, in a post-ICE world, the United States would enforce its immigration laws. Missing from the public discourse, however, is an affirmative vision for the mechanics of a just and humane immigration-enforcement system that could follow the abolition of ICE. Drawing on lessons from our own and other nations’ past immigration-enforcement schemes, enforcement mechanisms employed by other federal agencies, and interviews with leaders of the “Abolish ICE” movement, I seek to begin to fill this void. This Essay suggests a paradigm shift in immigration enforcement toward the creation of an enforcement scheme that does not rely on detention, mass deportation, or any dedicated agency of immigration police but is nevertheless realistic and effective at increasing compliance with immigration law. The new immigration enforcement principles set forth herein are intended as a starting point for the immigrant-rights movement and for policymakers to use, critique, and improve upon

Model of Transcriptional Activation by MarA in Escherichia coli

We have developed a mathematical model of transcriptional activation by MarA in Escherichia coli, and used the model to analyze measurements of MarA-dependent activity of the marRAB, sodA, and micF promoters in mar-rob- cells. The model rationalizes an unexpected poor correlation between the mid-point of in vivo promoter activity profiles and in vitro equilibrium constants for MarA binding to promoter sequences. Analysis of the promoter activity data using the model yielded the following predictions regarding activation mechanisms: (1) MarA activation of the marRAB, sodA, and micF promoters involves a net acceleration of the kinetics of transitions after RNA polymerase binding, up to and including promoter escape and message elongation; (2) RNA polymerase binds to these promoters with nearly unit occupancy in the absence of MarA, making recruitment of polymerase an insignificant factor in activation of these promoters; and (3) instead of recruitment, activation of the micF promoter might involve a repulsion of polymerase combined with a large acceleration of the kinetics of polymerase activity. These predictions are consistent with published chromatin immunoprecipitation assays of interactions between polymerase and the E. coli chromosome. A lack of recruitment in transcriptional activation represents an exception to the textbook description of activation of bacterial sigma-70 promoters. However, use of accelerated polymerase kinetics instead of recruitment might confer a competitive advantage to E. coli by decreasing latency in gene regulation.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figure

Gravitational Wave Burst Source Direction Estimation using Time and Amplitude Information

In this article we study two problems that arise when using timing and amplitude estimates from a network of interferometers (IFOs) to evaluate the direction of an incident gravitational wave burst (GWB). First, we discuss an angular bias in the least squares timing-based approach that becomes increasingly relevant for moderate to low signal-to-noise ratios. We show how estimates of the arrival time uncertainties in each detector can be used to correct this bias. We also introduce a stand alone parameter estimation algorithm that can improve the arrival time estimation and provide root-sum-squared strain amplitude (hrss) values for each site. In the second part of the paper we discuss how to resolve the directional ambiguity that arises from observations in three non co-located interferometers between the true source location and its mirror image across the plane containing the detectors. We introduce a new, exact relationship among the hrss values at the three sites that, for sufficiently large signal amplitudes, determines the true source direction regardless of whether or not the signal is linearly polarized. Both the algorithm estimating arrival times, arrival time uncertainties, and hrss values and the directional follow-up can be applied to any set of gravitational wave candidates observed in a network of three non co-located interferometers. As a case study we test the methods on simulated waveforms embedded in simulations of the noise of the LIGO and Virgo detectors at design sensitivity.Comment: 10 pages, 14 figures, submitted to PR

The Energy-dependent X-ray Timing Characteristics of the Narrow Line Seyfert 1 Mkn 766

We present the energy-dependent power spectral density (PSD) and cross-spectral properties of Mkn 766, obtained from combining data obtained during an XMM-Newton observation spanning six revolutions in 2005 with data obtained from an XMM-Newton long-look in 2001. The PSD shapes and rms-flux relations are found to be consistent between the 2001 and 2005 observations, suggesting the 2005 observation is simply a low-flux extension of the 2001 observation and permitting us to combine the two data sets. The resulting PSD has the highest temporal frequency resolution for any AGN PSD measured to date. Applying a broken power-law model yields break frequencies which increase in temporal frequency with photon energy. Obtaining a good fit when assuming energy-independent break frequencies requires the presence of a Lorentzian at 4.6+/-0.4 * 10^-4 Hz whose strength increases with photon energy, a behavior seen in black hole X-ray binaries. The cross-spectral properties are measured; temporal frequency-dependent soft-to-hard time lags are detected in this object for the first time. Cross-spectral results are consistent with those for other accreting black hole systems. The results are discussed in the context of several variability models, including those based on inwardly-propagating viscosity variations in the accretion disk.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. 18 pages, 9 figures. Uses emulateapj5.st

Complex X-ray spectral variability in Mkn 421 observed with XMM-Newton

The bright blazar Mkn 421 has been observed four times for uninterrupted durations of ~ 9 - 13 hr during the performance verification and calibration phases of the XMM-Newton mission. The source was strongly variable in all epochs, with variability amplitudes that generally increased to higher energy bands. Although the detailed relationship between soft (0.1 - 0.75 keV) and hard (2 - 10 keV) band differed from one epoch to the next, in no case was there any evidence for a measurable interband lag, with robust upper limits of $| \tau | < 0.08$ hr in the best-correlated light curves. This is in conflict with previous claims of both hard and soft lags of ~1 hr in this and other blazars. However, previous observations suffered a repeated 1.6 hr feature induced by the low-Earth orbital period, a feature that is not present in the uninterrupted XMM-Newton data. The new upper limit on $|\tau|$ leads to a lower limit on the magnetic field strength and Doppler factor of B \delta^{1/3} \gs 4.7 G, mildly out of line with the predictions from a variety of homogeneous synchrotron self-Compton emission models in the literature of $B \delta^{1/3} = 0.2 - 0.8$ G. Time-dependent spectral fitting was performed on all epochs, and no detectable spectral hysteresis was seen. We note however that the source exhibited significantly different spectral evolutionary behavior from one epoch to the next, with the strongest correlations in the first and last and an actual divergance between soft and hard X-ray bands in the third. This indicates that the range of spectral variability behavior in Mkn 421 is not fully described in these short snippets; significantly longer uninterrupted light curves are required, and can be obtained with XMM-Newton.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, accepted for ApJ, scheduled for August 1, 200