Immigration Law

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.

“It’s absolutely the case that Ice enforcement appears to be becoming more indiscriminate,” said David Hausman, assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school. “First, we know they’re trying to maximize the number of arrests each day, which means they can’t be as thoughtful about what they’re doing. And second, they explicitly have the goal of spreading fear among immigrants in the United States, and indiscriminate arrests accomplish that as well.”

“Contrary to what the administration has been saying, there are actually very few non-citizens who have criminal convictions in the country, so the idea that there could be mass deportations of people convicted of crimes is pure nonsense,” said David Hausman, assistant professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. “That’s made up.”

Deported veterans face significant barriers accessing a variety of veteran-centric services, including health care benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a study by the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.

Professor Sarah Song’s book “Immigration and Democracy” (Oxford) is discussed in Idrees Kahloon’s piece.