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Rep. Hansen Clarke and 3 Facts About Undocumented Immigration

Published on Wed, Jul 13, 2011

At a recent event in Detroit organized by the Alliance for Immigrants Rights to address local racial profiling of Latinos by ICE, U.S. Rep. Hansen Clarke took a step that few people — let alone politicians — take: he admitted that his father was likely an undocumented immigrant.

Clarke told community members, “I’m the son of an undocumented immigrant — and I’m proud to say that.” Clarke spoke at the forum at Hope of Detroit Academy, a school targeted in March by ICE agents who are now being investigated after going after parents as they dropped their kids off at school.

Clarke is of African-American and Bangladeshi descent. His African-American mother raised him as a single parent after his father who emigrated from Bangladesh, passed away when Hansen was eight years old. Hansen, the first U.S. Congressman of Bangladeshi descent, told the Detroit Free Press his father was ” ‘more than likely undocumented’ when he came to the U.S. His father immigrated in the 1930’s from pre-Partition India, then under British rule, and died in 1965.” (We would have liked to link back to the Free Press article, but are tired of linking to articles with the i-word in the title, especially as this man did not call his father “illegal.”)

In this anti-immigrant climate, Rep. Clarke took some political risk in admitting something about his family’s past that many other public officials would also be correct in disclosing. One of the most popular comebacks from a range of people — including minutemen border militia, hardcore immigration restrictionists like Numbers USA and the like, and both Republicans and Democrats — is that people need to get papers the “legal” way and “get in line,” just like their parents or grandparents or some ancestor did.Read more...

Published in the Colorlines Magazine

Supreme Court Holds that Courts Have Jurisdiction to Review Motions to Reopen

Kucana v. Holder, 558 U.S. 233 (2010)

 

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court held that the courts of appeals have jurisdiction to review a BIA decision denying a motion to reopen. Read more...

History of Executive Branch Authority in Immigration

Published on Fri, Sep 02, 2011

Today, the Immigration Policy Center releases Using All the Tools in the Toolbox: How Past Administrations Have Used Executive Branch Authority in Immigration by Mary Giovagnoli, Esq. The paper examines the political battle over implementation of provisions of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) during the late 1990s.

It also looks at the role of executive branch authority during a key moment in the Bush Administration’s work on comprehensive immigration reform. Using the tools of executive branch authority, both the Clinton and Bush Administrations made the most of what the law had to offer, staying within the letter of the law, but opting for interpretations that reflected differing, but legally permissable, readings of the law. This lesson is worth recalling in the fight over prosecutorial discretion and administrative relief today.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan to review 300,000 immigration cases to assess whether they fall within the Administration’s enforcement priorities has already inflamed critics. Because the Administration may close some low priority cases in order to focus its limited resources on more serious cases, critics are immediately claiming this is an “amnesty.” But the DHS announcement is about using executive branch authority—in this case, prosecutorial discretion—to carry out its policy priorities.Read more...

Published in the Hispanically Speaking

UPDATE: IEC Comments on Proposed DS 7002 (July 2012)

July 05, 2012-- The International Exchange Center has responded to the second round of proposed revisions to the DS 7002. Read our full comments to the Department of State here.