Border Enforcement

Student’s Deportation Shows a Pattern of US Government Targeting Iranians

Iranian students coming to the United States are being stopped at airports, having their visas revoked, and are being deported. Advocates warn this trend is emerging less than a month after hundreds of Iranian Americans were stopped and interrogated at a port of entry between Washington State and Vancouver, Canada. Shahab Dehghani, an Iranian student […]

Judge Allows Certain Family Separations at the Border to Continue

The Trump administration received an unfortunate victory in the case against their family separation policy. On January 13, 2020, Federal Judge Dana Sabraw sided with the government in a lawsuit challenging continued separations at the border. Although the judge ordered an end to most family separations in 2018, he has allowed families to be separated […]

On Trial: Inhumane Conditions in Customs and Border Protection Facilities in Arizona

After more than four years of gathering evidence of the substandard conditions in the government’s short-term detention facilities in Arizona’s Tucson Sector, a case challenging these conditions called Doe v. Wolf went to trial on Monday. Over the course of the trial, plaintiffs will show how individuals held in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) short-term […]

Trump Implemented Family Separation After Government Officials Raised Red Flags

Government officials were aware of the harm family separation would cause and were critical of the practice years before the Trump administration established it as an official policy. Advocates unearthed this and other details about the “zero tolerance” policy in response to a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed in April 2018. […]

‘Zero Tolerance’ Overwhelmed Courts and Diverted Resources From Criminal Investigations

Attorney General Sessions’ orders to prioritize prosecuting people for immigration-related offenses in 2017 and 2018 put a significant strain on law enforcement across the border, diverting resources away from drug and organized crime prosecutions. The increase in immigration prosecutions, which played a primary role in the family separation crisis, also led to overcrowded jails, backed […]

The Government Knew It Didn’t Have the Technology to Track Separated Families. It Did So Anyway.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—the agency responsible for systematically separating thousands of migrant families in the summer of 2018—lacked the technology or mechanisms to record and track the separations, a government watchdog group recently found. Family separations—done under the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance policy”—started before the policy was even announced. The policy was first […]

Volunteer Found Not Guilty After Providing Humanitarian Aid to Migrants

Over the last decade, the remains of more than 1,600 people have been found in the Arizona desert. Groups like No More Deaths, whose mission is “ending death and suffering in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands,” work to decrease that number. Their volunteer-based work is motivated by the slogan “Humanitarian aid is never a crime.” Last week, […]

Trump Administration Begins Sending Asylum Seekers to Guatemala

In yet another major blow to America’s asylum system, on Wednesday the Trump administration reportedly began sending some asylum seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala rather than permit them to seek protection in the United States. Under the “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” deal signed with Guatemala in July, the Guatemalan government will process the […]