AALS Annual Meeting

The AALS Annual meeting will be from Jan. 4-7 , 2006 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C.;as most of you law professors probably know, it was moved from New Orleans.  The Section on Immigration Law Luncheon is on Friday, Jan. 6.  (Unfortunately, it conflicts with the Section on Minority Groups Luncheon.).  A Section on Immigration Law Program, co-spronsored by the Section on Minority Groups, will be on Saturday, Jan. 7 from 9 a.m.-noon; the topic is “Law and Policy Affecting Immigrant and Refugee Children.”  See description below.  Another panel that may touch on immigration issues is the Section on Minority Groups program on “The Fate of Minority Inter-Group Collaboration, Conflict and Coalition Formation:  A Critical Dialogue About Minority to Minority Race-Relations” on Friday, Jan. 6 at 10:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Here’s a description of the Section of Immigration Law Program.  The papers presented will be published in the Boston University Law Review and the Boston University Public Interest Law Journal.

Moderator: Susan Musarrat Akram, Boston University School of Law
Speakers: Jacqueline Bhabha, Executive Director, Committee on Human Rights Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Berta E. Hernandez-Truyol, University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law
Angela Lloyd, The Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law
Christopher Nugent, Community Services Team Administrator, Holland & Knight, Washington, District of Columbia
Linda Piwowarczyk, Co-Director, Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, Roxbury, Massachusetts
David B. Thronson, University of Nevada, Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law

This program will highlight the legal standards, policies, issues and particular problems affecting immigrant and refugee children in the United States. The program comprises two panels, the first focusing on issues relating to immigrant and refugee children subject to removal proceedings, including detention standards and conditions, removal process and procedures, special problems facing children under the relevant standards and procedures, and the effects of the removal and detention process on the psychosocial needs of children.   The second panel, cosponsored by the Section on Minority Groups, focuses on constitutional rights, access to benefits, and problems of the applicability of such rights and benefits to immigrant and refugee children under state and federal law and policy. Both panels will incorporate aspects of U.S. domestic law and relevant international legal standards into the discussions.

Panel 1: Presenters Nugent and Akram, Bhabha and Dr. Piwowarczyk. Every year, thousands of migrant children are removed or deported by states because they lack regular immigration status. Some, such as Mexican children in the U.S. and Albanian children in Italy, are simply unaccompanied to the border and left to fend for themselves. More commonly, returned unaccompanied minors are handed over to welfare agencies, relatives, and state officials. No claim is made that this is a protective measure, although occasionally decision-makers argue that it is best for children to return ‘home.’ But neither is it claimed that removal or deportation are punitive measures for children the involvement of social services to trace and connect with families belies that. How, then, do states justify this aspect of their immigration policies? Do they consider children responsible for their irregular status and therefore in some sense culpable and deserving of punishment? Or do they consider children innocent victims of others’ choices? How, if at all, do they factor the ‘best interests’ of the child into their procedures? The removal procedures for unaccompanied minors highlight the tension between the state’s protective role as parens patriae, activating welfare support, and the state’s punitive role as border cop, ejecting illegals. Ms. Bhabha will focus on these questions, examining a range of circumstances in which unaccompanied minors are removed or deported by states under domestic and international legal frameworks, policies and practices in a range of states, and the urgent need for reform of current practices.

Mr. Nugent will focus more deeply on US domestic standards and policies affecting immigrant and refugee minors in detention. His discussion will highlight the particular problems of minors in the larger detention facilities on the US border, the problems of access to counsel and barriers to effective legal representation, from legal standards to immigration agency policies and practices.

Little has been written in the medical literature about the emotional impact of detention on children. Drawing from the available data and literature, Dr. Piwowarczyk will focus on the emotional effects of detention on children, and the particular psychosocial problems of children refugees in detention. She will review what is known by medical caregivers about the impact of trauma on refugee children, and put forward medical justifications for less restrictive responses than detention of immigrant and refugee children, and the need for more holistic settings for the long-term health and well-being of such children.

Panel 2: Presenters Thronson, Hernandez-Truyol and Lloyd. Immigration status plays a decisive, but largely overlooked role in family law matters. Professor Thronson has conducted a systemic review of family court decisions that reveal that judges and advocates in the family court setting frequently attach exaggerated legal significance to immigration status with little explanation and less analysis. Here, Professors Thronson and Lloyd will both explore in more depth the roles that child custody plays in immigration law. The erratic inclusion of custody requirements in immigration and citizenship law demonstrates lack of coherent policy regarding the role that custody should play in such settings. Moreover, the varying requirements of immigration law are out of synch with prevailing values and policies underlying custody determinations in family courts. Examining the lack of connection in these frameworks raises fundamental questions of childrens’ interests and rights, particularly immigration rights, within immigrant families. When children hold immigration rights that custodians are unable to claim, how can immigration law be reconciled with the complex realities of children as members of families? How, if at all, are traditionally recognized parental rights affected by immigration law? These two presenters will discuss the complex intersection of state family law and family courts on immigrant children’s rights.

Professor Truyol will look in more detail at U.S. immigration law affecting minors as it currently exists, as well as proposed legislation that affects documented and undocumented immigrant and minority families, such as the currently-debated ‘DREAM Act.’ She will compare the applicable U.S. domestic legal standards and jurisprudence to the relevant international human rights law framework, primarily the standards under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as other instruments. How do recent Supreme Court opinions acknowledging the role of international standards compare with the jurisprudence on constitutional rights/benefits (or lack thereof) with regard to immigrant children?

Business Meeting for Section on Immigration Law at Program Conclusion

KJ