Two-thirds of U.S. breaches of the civil and political rights covenant involve racial discrimination. AUnited Nations body has issued a damning report blasting the United States for its rampant violations of a major human rights treaty that it ratified in 1992. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) enshrines the rights to life,… Read more »
If the Supreme Court agrees with the new decision by a Texas federal judge, it will be devastating to 600,000 Dreamers. Eleven years after Barack Obama launched the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, six years after the Trump administration tried to rescind it, and five years after it began wending its way through… Read more »
Biden has recycled some of Trump’s racist asylum policies. As the repressive Trump-Biden Title 42 asylum policy ended on May 11, migrant rights advocates hoped that humane asylum rules would follow. Title 42, which allowed the U.S. government to expel asylum seekers with no due process, led to nearly 3 million expulsions since Donald Trump initiated the ill-conceived policy… Read more »
Shortly after taking office, Joe Biden sought to cancel the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy (formally known as Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP). Under the policy, asylum seekers who leave a third country and travel through Mexico to the U.S. border are forced to stay in Mexico while awaiting a court hearing on their… Read more »
Notwithstanding President Joe Biden’s promise to pursue a more humane immigration policy than his predecessor, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been illegally expelling Haitian migrants, with the Border Patrol cracking whips and herding them like cattle. When U.S. authorities put them on a plane to Haiti, “they chained us like animals — our… Read more »
This week’s news of the Biden-Harris administration’s about-face on U.S. refugee policy was a win for all the progressive forces that have been pressuring Biden to discontinue Trump’s egregiously low cap on the number of refugees accepted each year. But the victory did nothing to change the other massive structural ways in which the Biden-Harris… Read more »
After the arguments before the Supreme Court in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) case, it is difficult to predict the outcome. Justices often play devil’s advocate when questioning the lawyers, so reading the tea leaves about how a case will ultimately be decided can be a dicey proposition. But the justices’ questions appeared… Read more »
This term, the Supreme Court will decide whether people can be fired for being transgender or LGBQ, if people brought to the U.S. as children can be deported, whether states can impose restrictions on abortion that disproportionately harm poor women, how firm the separation between church and state is, the scope of the Second Amendment… Read more »
Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has effectuated 600 unilateral changes in immigration policy, more than any president in recent memory. Pursuant to its “zero tolerance policy,” the administration arrested undocumented immigrants who crossed the border, took thousands of their children away, put them in cages and then lost track of them, in violation of the Constitution’s Due Process Clause and the Convention on the… Read more »