All posts tagged: Immigration Law

Sheller Center Students File Tort Claims for Families Separated at the Border

The Trump administration has engaged in a policy of family separation, which it ramped up in 2018. Under that policy, families apprehended for crossing the border outside of a port of entry were forcibly separated. Parents were placed in adult detention while their children were sent to shelters for unaccompanied minors. They were frequently subjected to cruel conditions of confinement, including overcrowding and the inability to obtain adequate nutrition, hygiene, medical care or mental health services. Notably, the administration expressly announced its family separation policy as a tactic to deter Central American migrants from seeking safety in the United States. In these facilities, parents and children endured weeks or even months without contact with one another. Parents and their children did not know when or if they would be reunited because immigration officials would not provide any information. The separation of parents from their children has predictably caused significant and long-lasting trauma to these families who had sought refuge in the United States. Through the Sheller Center for Social Justice, we represented eight families in …

Looking Between Borders to Understand the Refugee Experience

Editor’s note: Lilah Thompson ’17 is a PSJD Pro Bono Publico Merit Distinction Honoree. This post originally appeared at the PSJD blog, available here. A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence. Of the 65.3 million people displaced worldwide 21.3 million are refugees. Over half of the world’s refugees are children. The number of refugees in the world is currently at the highest level ever recorded in human history. To fully understand the stories behind these staggering numbers, I worked with Professor Jaya Ramji Nogales to create Between Borders: A Refugee Simulation Experience. Between Borders is a participatory workshop that simulates the life of a refugee throughout all stages of the refugee process. This simulation is an awareness-building activity that places participants in the “shoes of a refugee” in order to conceptualize the experiences that they face. The simulation focuses on four important aspects: (1) why refugees flee; (2) how they are deemed refugees; (3) how refugees are screened and vetted; and (4) …

Getting To The Bottom Of The Immigration Ban

Whether you were affected, confused or just plain curious about the order, this piece is for you. This article seeks to answer a few pervasive questions: What happened? What even is a refugee? Are there differences between Trump’s order and Obama’s 2011 policy? Who did the order affect and how were they affected? Lastly, what should I do? What happened and what’s to come On January 27, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries, and from Syria indefinitely. The order’s full text can be found here. After a tumultuous couple weeks, the ban has since been lifted. A Seattle federal judge named James Robart temporarily blocked enforcement of Trump’s travel ban in its entirety. On February 9th, 2017, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Seattle judge and completely repudiated the White House’s attempt to restore the travel ban. Why? The constitutionality of the ban was put into question, and the government did not offer sufficient justification for why refugees and immigrants from seven …