You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"Forty years ago, Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980 to protect people who flee persecution to seek safety in the United States. This legislation adopted a refugee definition based on the UN Refugee Convention and prescribed equitable and transparent procedures for a uniform asylum process. Until the Trump administration, this commitment to protect asylum seekers who had reached our borders was honored by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Beginning in 2018, Donald J. Trump and his Attorneys General systematically demolished the system of humanitarian protections for asylum seekers, twisting statutory language beyond recognition through adjudicatory rulings, procedural cha...
“I worked in a trailer that ICE had set aside for conversations between the women and the attorneys. While we talked, their children, most of whom seemed to be between three and eight years old, played with a few toys on the floor. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a jail full of toddlers, but there they were.” For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government’s practice of jailing children and families for months, or even years, until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown Universit...
This book, told by Kenney and his lawyer Philip G. Schrag from Kenney's own perspective, tells of his near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya; his remarkable escape to the United States; and the obstacle course of ordeals and proceedings he faced as U.S. government agencies sought to deport him to Kenya. As we travel with Kenney through the bureaucracies that regulate immigration, we learn that despite this country's claim to welcome political refugees, our system is too often one of arbitrary justice highly dependent on individual public officials. A story of courage, love, perseverance, and legal strategy, Asylum Denied brings to life the human costs associated with our immigration laws and suggests policy reforms that are desperately needed to help other victims of human rights violations.
In 1996, powerful anti-immigrant forces in Newt Gingrich's 104th Congress worked hard to pass the most restrictive immigration law in decades. The new law has changed virtually every aspect of immigration policy, including the rules for political and religious refugees. However, the law is not as harsh as the chairmen of the immigration committees would have wanted. A fascinating case story of the legislative process and the author's experiences as a public interest lobbyist, A Well-Founded Fear tells how a coalition of human rights and refugee organizations fought to preserve the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. A vital contribution to the relation between human rights and immigration policy Nationally known author
Although Americans generally think that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is focused only on preventing terrorism, one office within that agency has a humanitarian mission. Its Asylum Office adjudicates applications from people fleeing persecution in their homelands. Lives in the Balance is a careful empirical analysis of how Homeland Security decided these asylum cases over a recent fourteen-year period. Day in and day out, asylum officers make decisions with life-or-death consequences: determining which applicants are telling the truth and are at risk of persecution in their home countries, and which are ineligible for refugee status in America. In Lives in the Balance, the authors ...
The first analysis of decisions at all four levels of the asylum adjudication process : the Department of Homeland Security, the immigration courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the United States Courts of Appeals. The data reveal tremendous disparities in asylum approval rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country. After providing a thorough empirical analysis, the authors make recommendations for future reform. From publisher description.
“An essential title for anyone thinking of law school or concerned with America's dysfunctional legal system.” —Library Journal On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise and law professors are among the highest paid. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession. Addressing all these problems and more is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis an...
This book explores the strategies of the global movement to change American nuclear test ban policy at the End of the Cold War, and the sources and nature of the George Bush administration's resistance to change.
Protect the consumer. Stop the schemes and ripoffs. Make the law work for the little guy. All easier said than done.... Memoirs and case studies on fraud and consumer protection from a lawyer who helped start New York City's first consumer watchdog agency. Schrag came into office expecting to initiate a new system, which would at last defend the powerless consumer. Instead, he discovered how both petty criminals and big corporations are able to use the law, the courts, and the general feeling favoring the status quo to delay and blunt any attacks made upon them. The book tells the fascinating and amusing story of how Schrag's young lawyers and investigators became disillusioned by observing ...
The 20th century has been described as the bloodiest in human history, but it was also the century in which people around the world embraced ideas of democracy and human rights as never before, constructing social, political and legal institutions seeking to contain human behaviour. Todd Landman offers an optimistic, yet cautionary tale of these developments, drawing on the literature, from politics, international relations and international law. He celebrates the global turn from tyranny and violence towards democracy and rights but also warns of the precariousness of these achievements in the face of democratic setbacks and the undermining of rights commitments by many countries during the so-called 'War on Terror'.