It’s November already, can you believe it? In addition to colder temperatures and the end of daylight savings times (hello, darkness!), it’s also time for the most “American” of holidays—Thanksgiving. While the history of Thanksgiving is much more complicated than what is commonly taught in schools, it’s nevertheless an opportune time to reflect on our presence in this country as immigrants, refugees, and, yes, colonizers, and also reflect on how we have historically treated other immigrants and refugees. To that end, we are looking back at five major acts and cases in US history that have shaped and influenced US immigration law and policy.
Read moreThe Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), an agency within the Department of Justice (DOJ) that adjudicates immigration cases and oversees the country’s immigration court system, has announced its intention to halt the Vera Institute of Justice’s Legal Orientation Program (LOP) while it audits the program’s cost-effectiveness. Vera’s LOP program offers legal educational services to detained immigrants. During the audit, the Trump administration will also evaluate the Vera Institute’s information “help desk,” which provides tips to immigrants who are not detained but still facing deportation. This announcement comes as DOJ attempts to deal with the massive backlog of approximately 650,000 immigration court cases by 2020. Earlier this month, the DOJ announced case quotas for immigration judges.
Read morePro bono refers to work for the public good and in service to low-income clients. As legal professionals, our law licenses symbolize the economic monopoly we have over the provision of legal services. With that monopoly comes an obligation to ensure that those legal services are available to all who need them, and not just the select few that can afford to pay for them. There are few fields where this obligation is more important than in immigration law. Unlike criminal law, where a defendant has a constitutional right to be provided an attorney in the event that they cannot afford one, in immigration law–and most other areas of civil law–there is no right to free counsel. Over the last decade, there has been an increasing recognition of the need for a “civil Gideon” right (Gideon refers to the seminal Supreme Court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that established the right to counsel in criminal proceedings)–the right to counsel for the poor in civil matters, including housing, family, and immigration law, among other areas of law.
Read moreA series of posts by Daryanani & Bland staff sharing their own “immigration” stories—how they (or their families) came to America and/or how they came to work in the immigration law field.
My immigration story begins when I discovered my grandfather had an accent. As a child, I never recognized his Irish “brogue” (the word supposedly comes from the idea that the Irish sounded as if they spoke with a shoe in their mouths—“bróg” is the word for shoe in Irish), distinctive after more than fifty years of life in the US. I heard no difference at all in how he spoke compared to how my parents or grandmother (native “noo yawkahs”) spoke.
My grandfather was born in the Lanes of Limerick, Ireland in 1912. These same Lanes were made famous in Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, and there has long been speculation in my family that the hearse driver mentioned in the book was my own great-grandfather. Who knows—people love a good yarn! Certainly Summer Street in Limerick—where my grandfather grew up—is a short walk from the home described in McCourt’s book. My grandfather had a 6th grade education but was among the most intellectual and well-read people I ever met. As a child during the Irish Civil War, he ran across enemy lines to deliver messages to the Irish Republican Army fighting the Provisional Government over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Following the war—as before it—he and his family struggled to survive in the urban slums, and it was no surprise that he would follow in the footsteps of millions of his countrymen and women and take the boat to America. He arrived in New York City at age sixteen in 1928. His name was Jack Bray.
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