Customs Enforcement Research Articles

The Enforcement Pathologies of Immigration Policing

State and local police have become increasing involved in enforcing immigration law. While so called “immigration policing” is not new, as some scholars have claimed, it has increased in visibility and influence. This is due in large part to state and federal legislation that has broadened the footprint of immigration policing programs, and to increased federal funding, which has enabled state/federal cooperative programs to flourish. The federal government has created many of the immigration enforcement partnerships between federal agents and state and local police. Today, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lists no fewer than thirteen immigration enforcement cooperatives, including the 287(g) program and Secure Communities, recently renamed the “Priority Enforcement Program.” In addition, state legislatures have also been busy empowering state and local police to do immigration enforcement in their jurisdictions, including in Arizona where an important immigration policing provision was upheld by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States.The increased participation of state and local officials has thrust immigration policing into the limelight and triggered passionate reactions by scholars and the media both pro and con. While these debates have important things to say, this article will assume that immigration policing – in some form – is here to stay. The reason is simple: Immigration policing simply makes sense (or in any event it is too tempting to resist). State and local police are already on the street interacting with citizens, enforcing laws, investigating suspicious conduct, and arresting suspected criminals. Why not ask officers engaged in these activities to pursue any suspected immigration violations at the same time, especially if they can do so without changing their ordinary policing activities? While there are 18,000 federal immigration agents there are over 750,000 state and local police with arrest authority. Conscripting state and local police creates a substantial “force multiplier” for the much more limited federal immigration workforce. Proponents of immigration policing argue that state and local police can serve as a force multiplier without producing any adverse effect on either federal immigration priorities or state law enforcement priorities. The goal of this article is to dispute this claim. The claim relies on the assumption that state and local officials will continue to make law enforcement decisions uninfluenced by the knowledge that stops, investigations, and detentions in connection with other crimes are a gateway to immigration enforcement. It is well know, however, that police officers routinely use “pretextual” street and traffic stops for minor offenses to investigate other crimes for which they lack probable cause. Not surprisingly, police involved in immigration policing are using street and traffic stops as a mechanism for investigating suspected immigration violations. This strategy both compromises federal immigration policy – by shifting the focus away from dangerous criminal aliens and toward minor offenders – and diverts state and local policing resources away from ordinary criminal enforcement. Moreover, stops with hidden immigration enforcement motivations lead almost inevitably to racial profiling, most of which is either legal or very difficult to challenge.The second part of the article draws on lessons from the Fourth Amendment context to explore possible solutions that will address these distortions while retaining important benefits from the federal/state/local partnerships. The most important strategy for addressing pretextual policing is to decouple state and local policing from automatic (or the perception of automatic) immigration enforcement. One step toward decoupling is to treat stops and arrests for minor offenses, which create the risk of pretextual stops and racial profiling, differently for purposes of immigration enforcement than stops and arrests for more serious crimes. A number of states have moved in this direction by declining to honor ICE detainers for potential immigration violators unless those individuals have actually been convicted of a serious crime. Other states have adopted policies that bar police from initiating police action for the purpose of investigating suspected immigration violations. ICE has also taken steps to channel its enforcement efforts toward illegal aliens who have committed serious crimes or repeatedly flouted federal immigration.Such efforts point the way forward in an enforcement world in which state and local immigration policing is here to stay.

Piecing Together the US Immigrant Detention Puzzle One Night at a Time: An Analysis of All Persons in DHS-ICE Custody on September 22, 2012

This paper analyzes a dataset of every person in the custody of the US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS-ICE or ICE) on September 22, 2012, and compares this ...

Rethinking Immigration’s Mandatory Detention Regime: Politics, Profit, and the Meaning of “Custody”

Immigration detention in the United States is a crisis that needs immediate attention. U.S. immigration detention facilities hold a staggering number of persons. Widely believed to have the largest immigration detention population in the world, the United States detained approximately 478,000 foreign nationals in Fiscal Year 2012. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency responsible for immigration enforcement, boasts that the figure is “an all-time high.” In some ways, these numbers are unsurprising, considering that the United States incarcerates approximately one in every one hundred adults within its borders—a rate five to ten times higher than any other Westernized country. An immigration law, known as the mandatory detention statute, is partially to blame for this recordbreaking immigration detention population. Under this law, facilities may hold noncitizens without providing them an opportunity to ask for release.

Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System

Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System

Secure Communities and Community Values: Local Context and Discretionary Immigration Law Enforcement

In an effort to target dangerous criminals in the United States illegally, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) developed the nationwide deportation programme called Secure Communities. Ostensibly a nationwide programme, the use of this programme instead varies widely across the United States, with some jurisdictions seeing large numbers of deportations, with many others seeing none. Employing ICE deportation data and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models, we examine what accounts for this variation. We find that local political attitudes play a role, with Republican-leaning jurisdictions and those in states that support restrictive state-level immigration witnessing more deportations. Perhaps surprisingly, jurisdictions with the most crime actually saw fewer. These dynamics were similar for models predicting both the number of deportations of individuals with criminal records and those without them. Instead of being driven by a desire to remove high-level criminal undocumented aliens, we conclude instead that the dynamics of this federal immigration enforcement effort are influenced by the local political setting.

The U.S. Immigration Crisis and a Call for the Church's Lifeworld Politics: Why Should Hauerwas Collaborate with Habermas on the U.S. Immigration Crisis?

The U.S. Immigration Crisis and a Call for the Church's Lifeworld Politics: Why Should Hauerwas Collaborate with Habermas on the U.S. Immigration Crisis? Ilsup Ahn Introduction: Saying “No” to the State's Biopolitics Against the Undocumented Migrants According to the recent survey report published by the Washington, D.C.‐based Public Religion Research Institute, throughout 2013, there has been consistent bipartisan and cross‐religious support for creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the United States. While 14 percent percent of Americans support allowing undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents but not citizens, 63 percent favor providing a way for immigrants who are currently living in the United States without legal documentation to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements. They also discovered that nearly two‐thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. immigration system is either completely broken (34 percent) or mostly broken but working in some areas (31 percent). The report also shows that 41 percent of Americans believe immigration policy should be an immediate priority for President Obama and Congress, while roughly as many (42 percent) say it should be a priority during the next couple of years. Interestingly enough, only 14 percent of Americans say it should not be a priority at all. Despite the majority of the U.S. citizens favor some sort of comprehensive immigration reform, the Congress has failed to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul to date largely due to the House Republican leaders, who recently unveiled their principles for an overhaul for the nation's immigration laws. These principles, however, do not clarify whether most undocumented immigrants would ever be able to become legal residents or U.S. citizens, while they would require tighter border security and more interior immigration enforcements. These principles seem to reiterate the problematic anti‐immigration mantra to continuously militarize our borders as well as to criminalize undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration has been increasingly criticized in regard to the inhumane deportation of many undocumented people, especially those parents whose children are U.S. citizens. Critiques argue that President Obama has overseen record levels of deportations, with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) repatriating about 2 million undocumented people since he took office in January 2009 (roughly 400,000 a year or 1,100 per day). Amid the increasing political turmoil relating to the immigration reform, the public media begin to notice that the real winners in immigration control are the prison industry. The Atlantic, for example, reports that since 2003, when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was created and government crackdowns on undocumented aliens increased, private prisons have gained business, with industry profits more than doubling. Damon Hininger, CEO of CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), said during a conference call with investors in May 2010 that between 2007 and 2009, when earnings for the S&P dropped by 28 percent, the company's earnings drew by 18 percent. According to The Atlantic, the government spends more than $2 billion a year on immigration detention, while spending only $72 million on alternatives to detention. It also reports that the private prison industry, such as CCA, has spent more than $1 million on lobbying. Although private prisons say that their lobbying efforts are aimed at promoting their services, not shaping immigration policy, immigrant advocates argue that the private prison industry is always lobbying for more detention beds. Given that the cost of detaining an immigrant averages $159 a day and half of 34,000 beds are operated by private prison corporations, it is not difficult to see the connection between the interests of the private prison corporations such as CCA and the Geo Group and the criminalization of undocumented migrants. According to Lee Fang of The Nation, the controversial Arizona SB1070 was developed in consultation with private prison lobbyists through a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Unfortunately, as Aubrey Pringle reports, several pending immigration bills would increase the number of incarcerated immigrants even more. The ongoing political struggles related to the increasing border militarization, the widespread criminalization of undocumented migrants, and the massive deportation of undocumented parents are the explicit exemplification of what philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call the...

Political Posters for the Twenty-First Century: A Spotlight on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

Political Posters for the Twenty-First Century: A Spotlight on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

Policy Climates, Enforcement Rates, and Migrant Behavior: Is Self‐Deportation a Viable Immigration Policy?

U.S. immigration policy has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. Previous research has focused on how temporal variation in federal policy has altered the migratory behavior of immigrants. The effect of spatial variation in enforcement remains untested. Relying on the criminological distinction between general and specific deterrence, we argue that high rates of enforcement are unlikely to encourage undocumented immigrants to self‐deport. We also examine the effects cultural and economic immigration policies adopted by the states. Previous research suggests that migrants will choose to remain in states with favorable environments, but this claim has not been directly tested. We draw on data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) to address these gaps. MMP data are supplemented with government data on federal enforcement obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and measures of state policy. Our findings suggest that higher rates of enforcement and the establishment of negative policy environments do not encourage undocumented immigrants to leave the United States at a higher rate than their documented counterparts do. Rather, high enforcement contexts exaggerate the differences between documented and undocumented migrant behavior, with undocumented migrants staying longer. Liberal state policies have no discernible effect.

The Silent Crisis

“My father went into that house and never came out. Now my mother went into that house. If she doesn’t come out, who will take care of me? Will you take care of me?” 4-year-old Jessie asked a woman she had just met that morning, who had accompanied her mother to an office building. Jessie’s father, Edy, with his request for political asylum from Guatemala denied, was arrested in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Burlington, Massachusetts, in late 2012. He was deported 2 weeks later, after 20 years in the United States. He had worked for the same family business for 15 years, paying taxes, making Social Security and Medicare contributions, and paying a lawyer $15 000 over the years for promises of adjusting his immigration status. Edy had gone to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office with Jessie, believing this was just another step in his process of status adjustment. That day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told Edy he was under arrest and would be deported. They told him to call Jessie’s mother, Ana, who was undocumented from Brazil, and have her pick up their daughter, who otherwise would be placed in an institution. They then told Ana they would deport her without Jessie unless she signed a document stating that she was leaving the country voluntarily. Ana signed. Jessie became nervous and aggressive. She thought

A Tuberculosis Outbreak Fueled by Cross-Border Travel and Illicit Substances: Nevada and Arizona

From May 2006 to August 2008, the Southern Nevada Health District identified eight tuberculosis (TB) cases in six adults and two children in a Hispanic community. We conducted an outbreak investigation to determine the extent of TB transmission and prevent additional cases. We investigated TB cases in Nevada and Arizona with the outbreak genotype or cases with suspected epidemiologic links to this cluster but without genotyping data. We reviewed medical records and interviewed patients and contacts. Subsequently, genotype surveillance was conducted for approximately four years to monitor additional outbreak-related cases. Eight outbreak cases were identified among six adults and two children. All patients were Hispanic and five were U.S.-born. The index patient was diagnosed while detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody but deported before treatment completion. He was lost to follow-up for two years, during which time he served as the source for six secondary TB cases, including his own child. Along with the index patient, five patients reportedly engaged in the sale or use of methamphetamine. Follow-up surveillance in the two states identified eight additional cases with the outbreak genotype; three had epidemiologic links to the index case. We found that incomplete TB treatment led to extensive TB transmission. We recommend thorough discharge planning and active measures to ensure continuity of care and TB treatment completion for people in custody at higher risk for loss to follow-up, which likely includes those engaged in the sale or use of illicit substances.

Crossroads: The Intersection of Immigrant Enforcement and the Child Welfare System

AbstractDiana's children were placed in foster care when they were one‐ and three‐year‐olds. Their mother was arrested when she fought back to defend herself against an attack by her abusive boyfriend, Thomas. Thomas assaulted her in her apartment when she tried to end their relationship. A neighbor heard screams and called the police. When officers arrived, Thomas told his version of the events, but Diana was not able to communicate with the officers, since they did not speak Spanish and did not obtain the assistance of interpreters. The officers saw scratches on Thomas and a possible bite mark, in addition to bruises and scratches on Diana, arrested both of them, and called Child Protective Services (CPS) to take the children. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) soon issued a detainer when they obtained a copy of Diana's fingerprints through the Secure Communities program in effect in her local jurisdiction. Upon further review of the circumstances, the prosecutor decided to drop the charges against Diana; however, ICE took custody of her. She was subsequently transferred to a different immigrant detention center 300 miles away.The CPS caseworker placed Diana's children in temporary foster care with foster parents who did not speak Spanish, instead of with a willing aunt who had undocumented immigration status. Diana's children, born in the United States, are U.S. citizens. As the months passed, the children were no longer learning Spanish. The children did not visit with or talk with their mother for over six months because the CPS caseworker was unsure of Diana's whereabouts and how to communicate with her, despite that the original case plan called for reunification. As a result, the goal of the case plan was revised to pursue the termination of parental rights instead of family reunification.

Archives and the Ethics of Replevin

One of the most contentious cultural property stories of the early 21st century the restitution of displaced treasures, from Nazi-stolen artwork to looted archeological finds to rare manuscripts. Replevin, according to lawyerarchivist Menzi L. Behrnd-Klodt, is one of several ancient common law remedies used to recover wrongfully taken personal property from whomever took it or holds it unlawfully.1 When analyzed in simple terms, returning stolen objects to the rightful owner clearly the right thing to do. In 2012, newspapers reported that Barry H. Landau, a once respected presidential historian, was convicted of removing manuscripts from archives. His finds included letters by Marie Antoinette, Karl Marx, and Franklin Roosevelt. He was sentenced to seven years in jail and forced to pay $46,525 in restitution to dealers who had bought manuscripts from him in good faith. Several thousand documents were recovered from his residence and returned. More displaced documents are currently being traced. By all accounts, justice has been served.2Several spectacularly successful replevin and restitution actions have recently wrested valued acquisitions from well-funded museums.3 In 2007, after years of legal wrangling and public controversy, the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles returned 40 ancient masterpieces to Italy including a massive statue of Aphrodite. The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, which in 1972 acquired a rare, classic painted vase called the Euphronios krater, returned it to Italy in 2008 after lengthy and contentious negotiations. The United States government has cooperated with the government of Mongolia to reclaim and repatriate a dinosaur skeleton, eight feet high and twenty-four feet long, removed from the Gobi desert for sale in the United States. The Mongolian police, Interpol, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were all involved. Through the process of restitution litigation, the long-dead dinosaur has become a celebrated symbol of national pride in Mongolia, and its return scheduled for 2013 cause for a hero's welcome.4 Treasures occasionally, although less frequently, travel in the opposite direction across the Atlantic. In 2006, the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna was forced to surrender five masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, paintings restituted to distant heirs now living in the United States, again after a protracted court battle.5Like paintings, antiquities and fossils, archives are cultural property and many of the same principles apply. If anything, public records, as a nation's memory, have a stronger claim to inalienability than artwork. This claim has been recognized in treaties for hundreds of years.6 Leopold Auer has identified dozens of international disputes over archival collections. Many such disputes have festered for decades.7 In 1866, France seized 297 volumes of Korean royal archives, which ended up in the Bibliotheque nationale de France where they were cataloged as Chinese manuscripts. Then in 1993, President Mitterand returned one volume to South Korea. The remaining 296 went back home in 2011, after 145 years.8 Books and manuscripts have long had a revered place in Korean culture, which produced the first book printed with moveable metal type in 1377, long before Gutenberg. Some curators claim that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of returning displaced cultural property, to the extent that scholarship inhibited, the public deprived of educational experiences, and the objects themselves are endangered.9 Can well intentioned restitution efforts simply result in manuscripts being displaced a second time, with all the attendant hazards? In the international arena, the current debate pits collectors such as museums and archives in the receiving countries against aggrieved parties in the source countries. Both sides have strong justifications for their claims.Because laws can be changed and reinterpreted, and judicial decisions are frequently inconsistent, this essay will focus on the moral and ethical arguments and justifications, not the legal ones. …

Reforming a Visa to Snitch

Status quo immigration laws contain a little used provision to provide visas for undocumented persons who can serve as reliable informants and testify at trial for prosecutors. However, the visas are limited to 250 per year, and only a law enforcement agency may apply for the visa on behalf of the non‐citizen informant.A review of data suggests that the visa is under-utilized. Through research and interviews with non‐citizen informants, I show how federal prosecutors are more inclined to use and threaten non-citizen informants with deportation rather than the possibility of getting a real shot at the American dream through cooperation. In cases where prosecutors do promise the S-Visa to an informant, they often fail to deliver on their promise while placing the informant in dangerous situations. In cases where local law enforcement and prosecutors have applied for the S-Visa, Immigration and Customs Enforcement have acted unreasonably to deny the applications.Given the shortcomings of the current S-Visa process, I propose that a system of mandatory disclosure whereby all law enforcement agencies shall be required to disclose cooperation agreements with non-citizen informants and witnesses to the Secretary of DHS. Non-citizen CI who can demonstrated helpfulness to law enforcement efforts should have the right to self-petition for the S-Visa with the USCIS, and that the number of visas available should be subject to a floating cap, rather than an arbitrary one. The S-Visa should also be available retroactively, so that CIs who have cooperated with law enforcement efforts before the existence of the program can also self-petition to evade deportation or petition to come back to the country. Reforming the S-Visa process would reduce the level of distrust that immigrant communities have towards law enforcement and encourage vulnerable persons to come forward to work with law enforcement in the prosecution of crimes. It would also restore a fairness and justice to non-citizens who did their civic duty and got beaten with the stick of deportation, as opposed to the carrot they were promised.

Victims or Criminals? Discretion, Sorting, and Bureaucratic Culture in the US Immigration System

This article examines the Obama Administration’s effort to encourage the use of prosecutorial discretion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the executive agency in charge of the enforcement of immigration laws. Since 2010, the Obama Administration has repeatedly stated that agency officials are to focus enforcement efforts on those who pose a threat or danger, rather than pursuing deportation of all undocumented immigrants with equal fervor. Yet despite repeated directives by the administration, the implementation of prosecutorial discretion is widely considered a failure. Data and anecdotes from the field suggest that ICE has yet to embrace this more nuanced approach to the enforcement of immigration laws. In this article, I argue that one key reason that prosecutorial discretion has not taken hold within ICE is the failure of the President and his administration to adequately account for agency culture. In particular, the prosecutorial discretion initiative directly conflicts with the central role that criminal convictions play in ICE culture. To support my argument, I present an in-depth case study of the agency’s refusal to exercise discretion in a highly compelling case. For over two years, ICE aggressively prosecuted a client of University of Arizona’s immigration clinic who appeared to be the quintessential recipient of prosecutorial discretion, as the victim of domestic violence, sex trafficking, and the primary caregiver for three young U.S citizen children. Despite these equities, ICE’s decision to prosecute was based wholly on the single conviction on her record, which was directly related to her victimization and for which she received a sentence of probation only.I situate this case study in a theoretical framework regarding bureaucratic culture. Applying this analysis to ICE brings into focus key elements of the agency’s culture, particularly its tendency to view all immigrants as criminal threats. This culture makes the sole fact of a conviction – without regard to its seriousness or context – a nearly irreversible determinant of the agency’s approach to any given case. My analysis of the nature and intensity of ICE’s bureaucratic culture has troubling implications for the capacity of the President and his administration to implement reforms that counter the lack of nuance in the immigration system’s current legal framework. It suggests that locating discretion primarily in the enforcement arm of the immigration bureaucracy has inherent limitations that lead to a system poorly designed to address humanitarian concerns raised in individual cases.

How to Stop a Deportation

O n an overcast September morning that seemed like any other, twenty-year-old Steve Li woke up early and began getting ready for his classes at the City College of San Francisco. He ignored the unexpected ringing of the doorbell, until it was replaced by an urgent pounding at the door. Moments later, as he stood in the bathroom, he heard his mother’s voice as she answered the door. What happened next is a nightmare familiar to some 11 million undocumented people who reside in the United States, many of whom live day to day with uncertainty. Deportations are on the rise. According to data from the Department of Homeland Security, last year they hit a record high of nearly 410,000, a rate double what it had been over the previous ten years. And that number doesn’t include “voluntary returns” — mostly people who are picked up by border patrol and forced to leave. Under the two Obama administrations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deported more people than during Bush’s presidency. Nearly half of those deported in fiscal year 2012 had no criminal record, like Steve Li. Of those with criminal convictions, most were convicted of low-level offenses such as forgery, driving without a license, or drinking in public. Too often, individuals facing deportation have endured this process in isolation, sometimes further isolated by feelings of shame. But with increasing frequency, communities — often those with the fewest legal rights — are organizing to expose and resist the violence of deportation. It is an understatement to say that it is difficult to stop a deportation. Legal codes regulating immigration and deportation can be arcane and esoteric, and are described as among the most complicated of U.S. laws. Nevertheless, victories are possible. One ad hoc defense group convinced a state senator to intervene in a deportation. Another campaign halted a seemingly irreversible final removal order at the eleventh hour — the procedural equivalent of slamming the brakes on a train and watching it come to a screeching halt at the edge of a cliff. Other times, victory manifests in meaningful but less measurable forms: a box full of letters, an extension granted in an appeals process, or a packed room full of supporters.

What College Counselors Need to Know About International Student Advisers: Field Notes on the Professionals, the Clients, and the Challenges

As the service functions of campus-based international student offices in American colleges and universities have changed and evolved, especially since 9/11, the roles of the professionals in those offices, the “international student advisers,” have changed as well. These unique professionals function in the central pressure point between two very different world views of international students. Higher education perceives them not only as benign members of the academic community, but as strong and necessary benefactors intellectually, culturally, and economically. However, this perspective is not shared by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose agents more often than not see international students as potential security threats. International student advisers are engaged in a high-stakes business where an adviser's actions can have tremendous impact on a student client's life, for good or for ill. This article will explore the professional lives of international student advisers and demonstrate the facets of their complex work which make it unique in higher education.

Gendered Borders: Forensic Evaluations of Immigrant Women

According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (2012), nearly 40 million people living in the United States are foreign born; one fourth of these immigrants are unauthorized adults, including 4.1 million women. Over 60% have lived in this country over ten years, and half are parents of minor children. Nearly three fourths of children born to unauthorized immigrants are U.S. citizens by birth and four million of them live in mixed-status families. From January to June 2011, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 46,486 undocumented immigrant parents who had at least one U.S. citizen child. ICE also oversees immigration detention facilities which daily house some 31,000 people awaiting adjudication. Children are placed into foster care and parental rights are terminated because mothers held in immigration detention centers are penalized for being unable to attend hearings in family court and for not meeting court-ordered requirements for regaining custody of their children. Forcibly separating unauthorized immigrant parents from their U.S. citizen children can have devastating and long-lasting effects on those children, posing serious risks to their safety, economic, psychological and physical wellness, and long-term development. Researchers studying the effects of deportation on mothers separated from their children have found that they suffer psychologically as a result of separations, disrupted lives, dislocation, leaving the familiar, not belonging, sadness, and grief. Following years or decades spent away from their cultures of origin, they additionally frequently lack the verbal, nonverbal, and culturally nuanced communication and relational skills needed to effectively maneuver in their new communities. It is with these populations in mind that we write this article, for these women and their families need culturally competent forensic evaluators who are well aware of the value and boundaries of their role as scientists working within the branch of the legal system of immigration law. In this article we (a) provide an ethical and professional context for the forensic evaluator, (b) review contemporary literature regarding immigration evaluations, (c) explore dilemmas facing the evaluator, and (d) propose an ethical and competent best-practice model for forensic evaluation procedures with immigrant women and their families.

Legal Research Guide for the Customs Enforcement of ITC Exclusion Orders

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has recently become more important in the enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights. One significant part of ITC enforcement is the enforcement of ITC exclusion orders by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This Legal Research Guide seeks to provide comprehensive coverage of the primary and secondary sources available in the area of CBP enforcement of ITC exclusion orders, and focuses on primary sources because of the subject's relative newness and administrative law nature.

(Be)laboring Childhoods in Postville, Iowa

By examining a flagrant case of “child” migrant labor in a meatpacking facility, this article addresses the cultural politics of global childhood. Conflicting constructions of childhood first emerged informally within kin and community networks. Community-based constructions were later overshadowed and delimited in a child labor trial that took place two years after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) raided Agriprocessors, the town’s major employer. I trace the shifting contours of cultural and legal battles over childhood and forms of citizenship that, in microcosm, speak to on-going debates over immigration and economic policies tying the United States to Guatemala. During a year of political campaigning, the Guatemalan president is assailed by reporters who hurl questions at him asking why he thinks he deserves to be re-elected. “You failed to keep your promise about improving the economy,” one reporter accused. The president, looking shocked and offended, replies, “What do you mean!?! Since I took office the economy has grown; now everyone has a job. Look!” he exclaimed, indicating a niño de la calle (street child) busily washing a parked car nearby. (Guatemalan political satire, originally circulated via a major Guatemalan national newspaper)

Informal Funds Transfer Systems as a Target of Customs Enforcement

Informal Funds Transfer (IFT) systems entail the movement of money without using formal financial institutions. People use IFT systems for several reasons, such as migrants remitting their income to relatives in home countries. While IFT can have legitimate purposes, it can also be exploited for criminal activities. In addition to being swifter, less expensive, and more convenient than some formal banking systems, IFT has some criminogenic advantages, including increased anonymity, weak recordkeeping, and non-transparent settlements. IFT systems are frequently used by informal traders and smugglers and, consequently, can help to evade compliance with customs regulations. This paper offers a preliminary examination of the implications for Customs of IFT systems and advocates that customs administrations increase their knowledge and enforcement activities with respect to IFT.