The Limits of Human Rights Law in U.S. Immigration Enforcement

Professor Jaya Ramji-Nogales (Temple) has a thoughtful and touching human rights analysis of immigration searches, seizures, and arrests on IntLawGrrls.com.  It takes off from the story in Sunday’s NY Times of an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was jailed after a traffic stop and, by the time she was released from county jail six days later, had given birth with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed. “County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband. After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail . . . .”

This incident  has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, Tenn., which gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers to arrest undocumented immigrants. It is one of 57 agreements that U.S.Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country.

KJ