Book Review

There is a frequent critique of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ protection role, which goes like this: as UNHCR has grown as a humanitarian aid delivery agency, law and human rights have lost currency. In Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, Guglielmo Verdirame and Barbara Harrell-Bond (with Zachary Lomo and Hannah Garry) take this as a starting point from which to reach a far more searing conclusion: UNHCR itself directly violates the human rights of the people it is supposed to protect. Detailed, direct and at times passionate, this book should be required reading for anyone who wants to know what is really happening to refugee protection. It should also require a response

Persuasive stories

Since some important and effective forms of persuasion are stories, a task for those interested in argumentation, informal logic and critical thinking, is to consider stories as arguments. In this essay, I discuss three: Plato\u27s Myth of the Cave, Ay n Rand\u27s Atlas Shrugged, and Toni Morrison\u27s The Bluest Eye. I suggest some responses to persuasive stories, including criticizing the plausibility of the story as story, developing counter stories, and considering the stories premises as g rounds for its conclusion. By doing so, I tentatively take steps towards a theory of story argument validity

Jet-Images: Computer Vision Inspired Techniques for Jet Tagging

We introduce a novel approach to jet tagging and classification through the use of techniques inspired by computer vision. Drawing parallels to the problem of facial recognition in images, we define a jet-image using calorimeter towers as the elements of the image and establish jet-image preprocessing methods. For the jet-image processing step, we develop a discriminant for classifying the jet-images derived using Fisher discriminant analysis. The effectiveness of the technique is shown within the context of identifying boosted hadronic W boson decays with respect to a background of quark- and gluon- initiated jets. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we demonstrate that the performance of this technique introduces additional discriminating power over other substructure approaches, and gives significant insight into the internal structure of jets

Immigrant Victims, Immigrant Accusers

The U Visa program provides an immigration status to noncitizen victims of crime, which is essential to prevent unauthorized immigrants from being afraid to seek help from the police, and thus becoming easy prey for criminals. This visa falls into a category of immigration programs that grant benefits on the basis of victim status, rather than on family or employment connections to the United States. But the federal government structured the U Visa program so that in order to be protected as a victim, a person must also become an accuser. The U Visa thus implicates the rights of third parties, the accused defendants, who are themselves likely to be immigrants and who may be deported because of the accusations leveled by U Visa recipients. This mixing of roles between victim and accuser is problematic because recent state court decisions have permitted defendants to cross-examine accusers about their desire to obtain immigration benefits in exchange for testimony. Defendants in these cases, who are likely to be male immigrants, have good reason to take advantage of this defense strategy to fight back against a system that easily perceives men of color as violent perpetrators while immigrant women are more easily seen as victims in need of protection. But this adds a new obstacle for immigrant victims to obtain law enforcement protection and justice through criminal prosecution. The solution to these emerging problems is to separate the role of victim from the role of accuser as much as possible. This article suggests several models that might accomplish this goal

A Taxonomy of Discretion: Refining the Legality Debate About Obama’s Executive Actions on Immigration

Broad executive action has been the Obama Administration’s signature contribution to American immigration policy, setting off a furious debate about whether the President has acted outside his constitutional powers. But the legal debate about the scope of the President’s authority to change immigration policy has not fully recognized what is actually innovative about the Obama policies, and thus has not focused on those areas where he has taken executive discretion into uncharted territory. This essay aims to add new focus to the debate about Pres. Obama’s executive actions by defining five different types of presidential discretion: Congressionally-authorized discretion, non-enforcement discretion, affirmative grants, general public information, and finally class-based rules. The essay summarizes the distinct legal issues that arise with each one. I argue that most of these categories of executive action do indeed have solid legal foundations. But the last – class-based rules – raises important questions about separation of powers

Immigration Law’s Looming Fourth Amendment Problem

In 2014, a wave of federal court decisions found that local police violate the Fourth Amendment when they rely on requests from the Department of Homeland Security to detain people suspected of being deportable immigrants. The problem with these requests, known as “detainers,” was that they were not based on any neutral finding of probable cause. But this infirmity is not unique to DHS requests to local police. It is characteristic of the normal means by which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests people and detains them at the outset of deportation proceedings. These decisions thus signal a glaring constitutional problem with the way America’s immigration enforcement apparatus has been constructed. This problem developed because for more than a century the plenary power doctrine permitted immigration law to exist in a parallel constitutional universe. But recent Supreme Court jurisprudence has substantially reduced the power of the plenary power doctrine to shield immigration enforcement from constitutional scrutiny. This article traces how immigration arrests have suddenly become vulnerable to challenge, and how the problem may be remedied by reinterpreting the Immigration and Nationality Act according to the doctrine of constitutional avoidance

Regulatory Constitutional Law: Protecting Immigrant Free Speech Without Relying on the First Amendment

The Supreme Court has long deprived immigrants of the full protection of substantive constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, leaving undocumented immigrants exposed to detention and deportation if they earn the government’s ire through political speech. The best remedy for this would be for the Supreme Court to reconsider its approach. This Essay offers an interim alternative borrowed from an analogous problem that arises under the Fourth Amendment. Under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has indicated that illegally obtained evidence may be suppressed in a removal proceeding only if the Fourth Amendment violation was “egregious.” Yet, some circuit courts have indicated that a regulation protecting immigrants from unjustified arrests and interrogations offers an autonomous, and potentially stronger, basis for suppressing evidence, suggesting that regulations may protect constitutional rights even where the Supreme Court has declined to fully enforce the Constitution. Using the Fourth Amendment example as an analogy, this Essay will propose regulations that would protect immigrants from selective prosecution for engaging in free speech, thus filling a gap left by the Supreme Court

Plenary Power Is Dead! Long Live Plenary Power!

For decades, scholars of immigration law have anticipated the demise of the plenary power doctrine. The Supreme Court could have accomplished this in its recent decision in Kerry v. Din, or it could have re-affirmed plenary power. Instead, the Court produced a splintered decision that did neither. This essay examines the long process of attrition that has significantly gutted the traditional plenary power doctrine with regard to procedural due process, while leaving it largely intact with regard to substantive constitutional rights