“Hidden Weapons” of Immigration Law: Interview with AIC

The New Yorker this week features an excellent article on the “hidden weapons” of immigration law. Similar to AILA’s invisible wall report, which led to Congressional hearings and a January 2020 AALS panel in Washington, DC (Organizer Jill Family, Shruti Rana, Ayelet Shachar, and myself), the article focuses on lesser known and yet highly consequential policy developments. It discusses in particular detail the newest travel ban and the Migration Protection Protocols. All in all, it offers a clear-eyed perspectives on the likely legacy of Trump for immigration law going forward.

Excerpts from the interview:

Is the Trump Administration taking or trying to take steps that will move them beyond working with the existing paradigm? Are they content to work within [existing] frameworks, and push them to the very limits of legality, or are there plans to move beyond that?

The Trump Administration wants to move beyond the current paradigm, and they are taking a lot of steps that push the boundaries of what’s already on the books, to create loopholes that let them push beyond what the law says. There’s a reason that so many of the Trump Administration’s policies have been blocked in court, and, even though some of them have been resuscitated by the Supreme Court and are currently in effect, there’s so much more that’s been blocked that barely even makes the national news.

The Big Picture with Trump’s Immigration Policy    

I think the big picture with the Trump Administration’s immigration policy is that it’s almost impossible to know what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis and that they are willing to take every step, no matter how small, in order to crack down on legal immigration and crack down at the border on those seeking asylum. So, for every major policy out there, there are a dozen other small things, each of which could block hundreds or maybe thousands of people from being able to stay in the United States or come here in the first place. The big picture at this point, three years into the Trump Administration, is that they are winning the war on asylum, they are winning a few battles in the war on legal immigration, in cutting the number of people who’ve come into the United States, but so far they haven’t won the war. A lot of what they’ve done is held in place with duct tape and string, and one court decision that goes against them could end it because they need Congress to actually make anything permanent.

Is there one particular thing that you think the press doesn’t cover much, and that has had a huge impact?

If there was one thing that I think the nation needs to be paying more attention to right now, it’s the Remain in Mexico policy, the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols.

MHC