Immigration Law

Comparing the month before the inauguration to the month of July, arrests of people with no criminal charges or convictions across the country have gone up about ten times, said David Hausman, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law and the director of the project, a repository of ICE data collected largely via FOIA request. 

“The data really is a gold mine of information about what’s happening in interior immigration enforcement,” said David Hausman, the project’s faculty director and an assistant professor at Berkeley Law.

“We don’t see ourselves as antagonistic and try to strike a collaborative tone because we think the agencies can actually benefit from releasing the information,” said Professor David Hausman. “Our goal in the most basic way is to get data out to the people, to update it and publicize it.”

“What makes this case different is how much it’s based on facts,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “It’s much harder for an appellate court to overturn a trial court finding of fact then it is with regard to legal conclusions.”

“It’s absolutely nonsensical and completely irrational,” said Leti Volpp, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. “States and localities that are not covered by these cases may be pressured by the federal government to deny birthright citizenship to children born in those jurisdictions.”

Professor David Hausman discusses the state of immigration in the United States.

“The administration is constructing the visual spectacle to accompany its assertion of an ‘insurrection’ demanding a militarized response,” said Leti Volpp, a professor of immigration law at the University of California at Berkeley. “The administration wants the American public to take away from these videos the sense that immigrants are completely dehumanized ‘bad people’ who need to be removed from this country; their continued presence threatens law and order.”

Professor Katerina Linos weighs in on potential legal challenges to President Trump’s travel ban affecting 12 countries.

Expedited removal was used in ~7% of ICE arrests in the first month of the new admin, slightly up from 2024, per data from UC Berkeley Law Assistant Professor David Hausman and the Data Deportation Project.

The Guardian reviewed cases in the arrest data, which was released by the Deportation Data Project from UC Berkeley Law School, where people who had previously been released on supervision were now arrested, as well as cases of people with pending immigration proceedings who were arrested in their communities.