For over a century, the federal government has wielded the immigration subpoena power in darkness, forcing private individuals, subfederal governments, and others to help it detain and deport. This vast administrative power has remained opaque even to those who receive these subpoenas and invisible to those it affects most. Indeed, the very people targeted by these subpoenas often don’t know they exist, much less how they facilitate arrest and...
Immigration Enforcement
Despite deportation’s devastating effects, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) specifies deportation as the penalty for nearly every immigration law violation. Critics have regularly decried the INA’s lack of proportionality, contending that the penalty often does not fit the ofÂfense. The immigration bureaucracy’s implementation of the INA, howÂever, involves a spectrum of penalties short of deportation. Using tools such as administrative...
Three successive presidential administrations have opposed immiÂgrant-sanctuary policy, at various intervals characterizing state and local government restrictions on police participation in federal immigraÂtion enforcement as reckless, aberrant, and unpatriotic. This Article finds these claims to be ahistorical in light of the long and singular hisÂtory of a field this Article identifies as “police federalism.” For nearly all of U.S. history,...