Humanitarian Protection

The enforcement of immigration laws is a complex and hotly-debated topic. Learn more about the costs of immigration enforcement and the ways in which the U.S. can enforce our immigration laws humanely and in a manner that ensures due process.

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September 21, 2017

With the stroke of a pen, the Secretary of Homeland Security upended the lives of over 1,000 Sudanese nationals living in the United States with the announcement this week that Temporary Protected...

September 20, 2017

U.S. immigration officials have a long history of overstepping the boundaries of their legal authority and violating the constitutional and other legal rights of migrants at the Southwest border....

September 11, 2017

In a unanimous decision, the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision on Friday in Hawaii v. Trump, allowing extended family members as well as certain refugees to enter the United States. In...

September 6, 2017

On January 13, 1898, the novelist Émile Zola penned a now famous open letter in the French newspaper L’Aurore, accusing the French government of anti-Semitism for falsely convicting military...

August 28, 2017

Hundreds, if not thousands, of noncitizens with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) now are eligible to apply for lawful permanent residence because of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision. In...

August 24, 2017

The Administration’s efforts to massively expand immigration detention in the United States are already evident in Texas, where a for-profit prison company is building the largest complex in the...

August 21, 2017

Nothing is a better predictor of an immigrant’s success in their immigration case, than whether or not they have access to competent legal assistance. However, the U.S. Government has at times...

August 9, 2017

An immigration judge ordered the immediate release of a three-year-old immigrant child and his mother from a detention center in rural Pennsylvania on Monday, stating that it was one of the most...

July 26, 2017

Over 300,000 individuals who currently have legal status could lose it if their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is terminated over the course of the next year. Nationals of ten countries who have...

July 17, 2017

This story was updated on July 19, 2017. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson ruled last week that “grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and...

October 3, 2019

For many small towns and rural communities, opening their doors to refugees is part of a local strategy to reverse population decline, stimulate their workforce, and build diverse communities....

This lawsuit seeks to uncover information about the government’s troubling new practice of employing U.S. Custom and Border Protection officers to screen asylum seekers.
October 2, 2019
The American Immigration Council and Tahirih Justice Center filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in federal court to compel the government to release records about the Trump administration’s troubling new practice of allowing U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to screen individuals seeking asylum in the United States. The lawsuit seeks these documents to shed light on changes to the asylum screening process, CBP’s role in conducting interviews and making determinations regarding an asylum seeker’s “credible fear” of persecution, and the measures taken by CBP, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Department of Homeland Security to implement this new practice.
September 27, 2019

President Trump yesterday proposed a reduction in the annual number of refugee admissions to 18,000 persons for 2020. This is the lowest number ever in the 40-year history of the refugee program,...

September 26, 2019
Immigrant rights attorneys moved to block the Trump administration’s Asylum Ban from affecting tens of thousands of migrants who have already attempted to access the U.S. asylum process before the ban was implemented. With limited exceptions, the Asylum Ban prohibits anyone who traveled through a third country and did not seek protection there from obtaining asylum here. The request filed today is in the ongoing case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border, including the “metering” policy.
September 20, 2019

Five mothers and their children sued the U.S. government on Thursday for forcibly separating them in 2018. The five families are among the thousands of parents and young children who were split...

September 19, 2019
Five asylum-seeking mothers and their children who were torn apart under the Trump administration’s family separation policy filed a lawsuit against the United States for the cruel treatment and agony U.S. immigration agencies inflicted on them. The five parents and their children, who were as young as five at the time of the separation, claim that the U.S. government intentionally subjected them to extraordinary trauma that will have lifelong implications.

The American Immigration Council filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of State (DOS) seeking information regarding the...

September 13, 2019

The Trump administration is considering decreasing the maximum number of refugees accepted into the United States to 10,000 and as possibly low as zero, administration officials confirmed last...

September 12, 2019

The Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling on Wednesday allowing the Trump administration to implement a ban on asylum seekers at the southern land border. The ban applies to people who...

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