Issue: 1

In nearly three years in office, President Donald J. Trump’s war against immigrants and the foreign-born seems only to have intensified. Through a series of Executive Branch actions and policies rather than legislation, the Trump Administration has targeted immigrants and visitors from Muslim-majority countries, imposed quotas on and drastically reduced the independence of Immigration Court Judges, cut the number of refugees admitted by more than 80%, cancelled DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and stationed Immigration Customs and Enforcement (“ICE”) agents at state courtrooms to arrest unauthorized immigrants, intimidating them from participating as witnesses and litigants. Although initially saying that only unauthorized immigrants convicted of serious crimes would be prioritized for deportation, the Trump Administration has implicitly given ICE officers carte blanche to arrest unauthorized immigrants anytime, anywhere, creating a climate of fear in immigrant communities.

Particularly disturbing is the targeting of asylum-seekers, employing the criminal justice system and the illegal entry statute in the “zero tolerance policy.” Under this policy, children, including toddlers, are seized and languish for months and years separate from their families, many of whom are seeking asylum. Directly contrary to federal statute and international law, another policy makes anyone who enters the country without inspection ineligible for asylum. Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s second Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), ordered asylum applicants to await the lengthy processing of their claims in cartel-ruled border areas of Mexico, with no realistic safe shelter and deprived of all meaningful opportunity to exercise their statutorily-guaranteed right to access to counsel—a necessity, given today’s convoluted asylum law.

Trump’s first Attorney General, Jefferson Sessions, largely disqualified as grounds for asylum even the most brutal and terroristic persecution of women and violence perpetrated by inescapable quasi-state gang actors. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) officers mislead asylum-seekers at the southern border, telling them they don’t have the right to apply for asylum or saying yes, they may apply, but admitting only a minute fraction of those who present themselves for processing at ports of entry. President Trump’s Administration refuses to grant parole or reasonable bond even to those asylum-seekers who establish a credible fear of persecution, frequently resulting in long-term detention, and forcing on detained asylum-seekers the Hobson’s choice of lengthy incarceration in terrible conditions in the United States or the risks of persecution and death in their countries of origin.

International law prohibits using the criminal justice system or prolonged administrative detention to deter and discourage bona fide asylum-seekers from asserting and proving their claims. We suggest two remedies: Federal courts should enforce article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention (1) by prohibiting criminal charges of unlawful entry against bona fide asylum-seekers until they complete the asylum application process and are denied asylum; and (2) by requiring parole or reasonable bond for asylum-seekers who pass fair credible fear interviews. The article argues that bona fide asylum-seekers should be kept in detention only for a short period, if at all, to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution.

Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, made binding on the United States through our accession to the 1967 Refugee Protocol, generally prohibits “impos[ing] penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees . . . where their life or freedom was threatened.” “Penalties” clearly must include not only criminal prosecution and prison, but also prolonged immigration detention and the seizure of children from parents without good cause, for “deterrence” purposes. We argue also that customary international law and human rights treaties support the recommended remedies and stand squarely against the Trump Administration’s policies. Federal courts may utilize customary international law directly or through the Charming Betsy canon.

Not only do the Trump Administration’s harsh immigration policies and practices violate international law and American values, but also foretell a government tending toward exclusion, racism, nationalism, parochialism, authoritarianism, and disregard of the rule of law. The parallels between the Trump Administration and Hungary’s autocratic, essentially one-party, state, are chilling. See Patrick Kingsley, He Used to Call Victor Orban an Ally. Now He Calls Him a Symbol of Fascism, N.Y. Times (Mar. 15, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/europe/viktor-orban-hungary-ivanyi.html (on file with the Columbia Human Rights Law Review).

Federal courts, however, have both the authority and the responsibility to enforce the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Refugee Protocol as well as international human rights norms to protect asylum-seekers from criminal prosecution and from prolonged detention. The Framers of the United States Constitution and its key amendments envisioned that federal courts would apply treaties as the rule of decision to protect foreigners and would serve as a check upon an Executive that tramples on individual rights, particularly the rights of a vulnerable minority. Given the outlandish behavior of this Administration, federal courts must live up to that vision.

The current refugee crisis demands novel legal solutions, and new ways of summing the political will to implement them. As a matter of national incentives, the goal must be to design mechanisms that discourage countries of origin from creating refugees, and encourage host countries to welcome them. One way to achieve this would be to recognize that persecuted refugee groups have a financial claim against their countries of origin, and that this claim can be traded to host nations in exchange for acceptance. Modifications to the international apparatus would be necessary, but the basic legal elements of this proposal already exist. In short, international law can and should give refugees a legal asset, give host nations incentives to accept them, and give oppressive countries of origin the bill.

Pursuant to our obligations to the international community, the United States provides asylum to individuals fleeing persecution “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” The “on account of” prong of the asylum determination is referred to as the nexus requirement. The paradigmatic asylum case features a man fleeing a dictatorial regime that has persecuted or would persecute him on account of his political dissidence or ethnicity. Absent credibility concerns, these cases are routinely granted, and immigration judges do not question whether the nexus requirement has been met.

In other cases, however, for example cases in which a woman is fleeing gender-based violence such as domestic violence, trafficking, or forced marriage, or cases in which a young man is fleeing retribution because he refused recruitment to a gang, the immigration agency has frequently denied relief. Often, even if the applicant has shown that she or he is a member of a cognizable particular social group or has another protected trait, immigration judges have held that the nexus requirement has not been met. Judges have reasoned that “personal” or “criminal” reasons motivated the persecution, as opposed to the protected ground. In the domestic violence context, for example, immigration judges have held that the abuse occurred because the abuser was a “despicable person” or due to his “inherent meanness,” rather than on account of the victim’s gender or social group. Similarly, in the gang context, immigration judges have held that the persecution occurred due to generalized violence or the gang members’ desire for increased power, as opposed to the victim’s gender or social group.

Yet, in the paradigmatic asylum case, immigration judges have not stopped to ask whether the dictator was a “despicable person” or in pursuit of more power. They have implicitly recognized that although these things may of course be true, it is also clear that the persecution occurred due to the victim’s political opinion or ethnicity.

This article attempts to explain that discrepancy. I argue that, unlike the paradigmatic asylum case, where the persecutor’s motives are overt and well-documented, some gender-based cases and cases based on gang violence feature “silent motives.” In cases involving silent motives, it falls upon the immigration judge to fill in the nexus gap left by this silence. Accordingly, unlike in the paradigmatic asylum case, the nexus determination in such cases is susceptible to influence from the immigration judge’s biases.

This article uses theories from cognitive science to posit that when immigration judges analyze silent motives cases, they use heuristics and other mental shortcuts, which often work against finding nexus on account of a protected ground. In two prior articles—The New Nexus and Nexus Redux—I proposed a new standard for evaluating nexus in asylum cases. This article explains why such a standard is necessary.

On May 19, 2017, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan offered the introductory keynote remarks at the Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers’ Network Annual Human Rights in the U.S. Symposium, entitled Localizing Human Rights in the New Era: Strategies for State and Local Implementation of Human Rights in the United States. The following is adapted from her remarks.

Human rights in the United States are at an inflection point, and the orientation is local. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election and renewed threats to human rights and democratic institutions, state and local officials and human rights advocates are working locally to resist harmful federal policies and to fill the gaps in federal civil rights enforcement. Indeed, safeguarding and securing human rights at the local level has more urgency than ever. Near daily protests and demonstrations, which consistently invoke human rights language and framing, illustrate the breadth of rights at stake.1 Human rights were front and center at the women’s marches that erupted across the country in January of 2017. Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives have embedded human rights into their approaches. And recent efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have sparked public support for healthcare as a human right across the United States.

As rights protections are increasingly threatened, many states and local governments are stepping in, often echoing support for human rights. For example, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges grounded her call to reject the repeal of the ACA in human rights, stating that it “is immoral that anyone in America would be without affordable access to healthcare, which is [one of] the most basic of human rights.” The National League of Cities has noted the negative human rights implications of state laws that preempt these progressive local policies.

Of course, state and local governments have long played an important role in bringing the United States into compliance with its international human rights commitments. But in recent years, the role of local governments has taken on greater significance, as an increasing number of state, city, county, and municipal level officials embrace a proactive human rights approach, develop new tools and techniques to address local problems, and influence local, state, and national policy. Lawyers and advocates, too, are initiating, encouraging, and promoting innovative efforts to “bring human rights home.” This special issue of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review explores the localization of human rights in greater depth.

This Note contributes to the literature in three ways. Part I of this Note defines and describes the targeted context, provides examples of state/municipal delegation, discusses the underlying tension between vindicating federal rights and respecting states’ rights to structure their own internal governance, and observes that courts have taken a nuanced approach to resolving this tension analogous to § 1983’s standards supervisory liability. Part II describes judicial approaches to state/municipal liability and analyzes two proposed theoretical frameworks. Part III examines the history and function of § 1983’s “supervisory liability” standards, looks at recent state/municipal delegation cases through the lens of supervisory liability, and argues for the adoption of an analogous standard to govern state/municipal delegation.

Whether to believe an asylum applicant is one of the most critical issues in asylum law. Many competing interests are in direct conflict: the need to protect people from persecution, the government’s desire to control entry into the country as an exercise of sovereignty, the extreme difficulty of gathering documentary proof of one’s persecution, and the government’s concerns about allowing security threats into the country. It is essential to strike the right balance between these conflicting priorities. The conflict between national welfare and public safety against individual liberty and personal security is not, however, a matter of mere policy preferences. The Constitution demands that whenever government action threatens to deprive an individual of their liberty, that individual must be provided due process. Unfortunately, policymakers have adopted the rhetoric of “security” and cultivated a climate of fear to justify increasing the burdens on refugees to prove their eligibility for asylum. In 2005, the REAL ID Act, claiming to be an effort to maintain security and identify asylum fraud, dictated the factors immigration judges must consider in determining whether an asylum applicant’s testimony is credible and therefore able to support their claim for asylum. Among these factors is the applicant’s “demeanor.”

This Note argues that the consideration of demeanor is a violation of asylum applicants’ due process rights. Though demeanor evidence is pervasive throughout the American legal system, its validity has been called into question by modern psychological studies, and its use has been sharply criticized by legal scholars. Furthermore, unique aspects of asylum adjudication make the use of demeanor especially damaging. Because corroborating evidence is frequently unavailable to asylum applicants, their claims typically turn on their own testimony. To have that testimony found not credible will almost certainly mean denial of the asylum claim. The extraordinary breadth of ways in which demeanor can be assessed, combined with the lack of meaningful judicial review of demeanor determinations, gives immigration judges overwhelming discretion to deny claims for asylum.

Special Administrative Measures (“SAMs”) are rules meant to let the government restrict the contact that dangerous prisoners may have with the outside world in order to prevent further harm to society. SAMs can result in extremely harsh conditions on top of lengthy solitary confinement—practices that many groups, including the United Nations, believe may constitute torture. SAMs were initially imposed mainly against high-risk detainees, such as prisoners who had ordered multiple murders from behind bars, and high-ranking terrorists convicted of mass murder. However, since 9/11, the application of SAMs to pre-trial detainees, especially Muslim terrorism suspects, has become alarmingly general, often seeming more punitive than preventative in nature, to the detriment of their Sixth Amendment rights. In light of the very serious threat that SAMs pose to fair trial guarantees, future courts should weigh the defendant’s fundamental right to an adequate defense against the seriousness of the risk of future injury or loss of life ordered by the prisoner from behind bars, ensuring that the SAMs imposed on a given prisoner are narrowly tailored to further the state’s admittedly compelling interest in public safety. Applying heightened scrutiny to pre-trial SAMs will allow judges to uphold restrictions against high-ranking prisoners who are truly likely to cause death or injury, as well as protect the integrity of the legal profession and the Sixth Amendment.

Over the last 27 years, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has developed a rich jurisprudence on the circumstances in which individuals have been arbitrarily detained. Until recently, most of this jurisprudence focused on detention resulting from the exercise of rights and freedoms, and serious violations of the right to fair trial. The Working Group is increasingly receiving communications involving detention on discriminatory grounds and its findings are evolving in response. Despite significant progress, there are several issues yet to be resolved by the Working Group as it moves toward a more comprehensive equality-based conception of arbitrary detention. The unresolved issues include the need for greater clarity on what constitutes discrimination; how to deal with laws that are discriminatory; how to distinguish between detention resulting from the exercise of rights and from discrimination; whether protection should extend to a broader range of individuals and groups; why poverty matters in detention practices, and whether the Working Group’s recommendations and follow-up need to be tailored in cases of discrimination. This article offers suggestions on the direction that the Working Group might take in its jurisprudence to resolve these remaining areas of uncertainty, including clarifying the circumstances in which differential treatment will amount to discrimination, determining that detention arising from discriminatory laws has no legal basis, taking a flexible approach to the overlap in the categories it employs to evaluate arbitrary detention, incrementally extending protection to marginalized groups such as those living in poverty, making recommendations to address the structural causes of discrimination, and using its follow-up procedure to highlight cases of detention on discriminatory grounds.

International law prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of life, which includes extrajudicial killing. This norm is codified in every major human rights treaty and has attained jus cogens status as a non-derogable norm in international law. In the United States, the Torture Victim Protection Act (“TVPA”) establishes civil liability for extrajudicial killing. As evidenced in the TVPA’s text and legislative history, the definition of extrajudicial killing is based on international law. Despite the clear meaning of the TVPA’s text and the clarity of international law, the TVPA’s definition of extrajudicial killing is still contested in litigation, and some courts express uncertainty about its meaning. This raises a simple question: what constitutes an extrajudicial killing? This Article reviews the status of extrajudicial killing and clarifies its discrete elements under international law. It then considers the status of extrajudicial killings in the case of Mamani v. Berzain, a TVPA case involving the responsibility of the former President and Defense Minister of Bolivia for the killing of civilians in a 2003 government crackdown.

The United States is deeply divided on matters that range from immigration to religion to fracking. “Blue” states resist “red” federal policies, and intra-state disputes pit state legislatures against recalcitrant local governments. One of these intergovernmental policy flare-ups involves so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions”—government actors that object to more aggressive immigration enforcement by slow walking their voluntary compliance or denying it altogether. In some cases, they have filed lawsuits to voice their dissent.

This Article analyzes the recent wave of sanctuary jurisdiction lawsuits in detail and identifies ways in which they undermine claims that local governments are powerless in the face of federal or state authority. Structural and civil liberty constitutional rights may protect local governments from some state and federal mandates. Local residents too may have resistance options beyond the voting booth and the moving van.

This should matter to all sides of the immigration debate: those who support the federal government’s strict immigration policies, those who favor state-federal cooperation in enforcement, and those who believe local jurisdictions should be given room to resist on policy grounds. But local governments’ right to dissent goes beyond immigration law. The sanctuary jurisdiction controversy may guide local officials in many other areas, and help illuminate how and when they may assert local rights.

This Article outlines the contours of potential local rights and makes three descriptive claims. First, respect for local power is on the firmest ground when it fortifies constitutionally sound government, top to bottom. Second, these tools of local resistance are quite limited. They work only in cases where upper level government mandates are beyond the constitutional pale or debatably so, and where courts can and should play a role in calling the lines. Third, they are available to all local government actors, not merely to progressive urban actors. The Article also makes the following normative claim: preserving constitutional breathing room for local dissent is critical to a healthy interchange between and among federal, state, and local governments. Above all, it promotes fundamental liberty values.

This is not a “city power” manifesto; it is a “constitutional city” manifesto. This Article maintains that the articulation and enforcement of constitutional ground rules is particularly critical in the current moment of hyper-partisanship and centrifugal forces that undermine union and intergovernmental cooperation. A call to these basic principles may offer Americans the hope of a fair game, however intensely and politically the game is fought.