Lecture
The Crimmigrators
- Speaker: Professor Juliet Stumpf; Chair: Professor Maartje van der Woude
- Date
- Friday 17 January 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- B0.20
Hosted by The Van Vollenhoven Institute, co-sponsored by Leiden University’s Social Citizenship and Migration interdisciplinary programme, and Border Criminologies
Donald Trump ran for election, and won, on the strength of his promises to close the US – Mexican border, and to implement mass detention and deportation. These promises rely on a massive expansion of crimmigration, the intersection of immigration and criminal law and policy. Crimmigration reflects the use of seemingly ordinary powers to accomplish extraordinary things: mass deportation, surveillance, policing, and detention and incarceration, in ways that globally change the contours of migration. The study of crimmigration tends to focus on dissecting its components in law and policy and its consequences. Little attention is devoted to decisions about who is tasked to use those powers. The decision about who will decide an immigration issue can shape the decision itself, and confine or define its resolution. Several U.S. case studies illuminate how changing the decisionmaker made all the difference not just in how a legal issue was addressed, but in how it was defined, and the scope of its resolution. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), the REAL ID Act, and the treatment of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border translate into three legal issues: whether to deport, whether to authorize an individual to drive, and whether to hear a claim for asylum. While the case studies are based in the United States, they raise a larger question of how changing the decisionmaker can either exacerbate crimmigration, or inoculate against it.
About Juliet Stumpf
Juliet Stumpf holds the Edmund O. Belsheim Professor of Law chair at Lewis & Clark Law School. She is a scholar of immigration law and crimmigration law, the intersection of immigration and criminal law. Her research seeks to illuminate the study of immigration law with interdisciplinary insights. She has published widely in leading journals and books, including a series of crimmigration articles beginning with The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power, 56 AM. U. L. REV. 367 (2006), and she co-authors the casebook Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (9th ed. West 2020). She has been recognized as one of the ten most-cited immigration law scholars in the United States