How to Normalize Immigration: Elements of Liberal Immigration Reforms

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

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The United States is experiencing constitutional failure. Many of the guardrails of our democracy have given way.¹ At this moment, it requires a feat of imagination to conjure what a new immigration system might look like when liberals regain power. According to the assessment of 500 political scientists (I am one of the respondents) who are regularly queried in the Bright Line Watch survey, the US is currently entrenched in some form of authoritarianism.² The first instinct is to stop the bleeding, to stop the slide into complete authoritarianism. Coming up with reforms to heal and strengthen US democracy may be secondary.

But liberals need to simultaneously throw sand in the gears of Donald Trump’s attempt at authoritarian consolidation and start thinking about what a replacement immigration system would look like.

A blueprint for reform is necessary because we also know from political-science research that across sixty-nine countries from 1900 to 2023, many polities that slide into authoritarianism eventually rebound toward democracy, in a U-Turn curve. The authors of a recent study found:

[A] significant homogeneity for U-Turns across regime types: 94% involve a period of autocracy at the “bottom.” In other words, a democratic breakdown does not necessarily prevent a return to democracy, especially if autocratization is halted and reversed relatively swiftly. An average U-Turn episode lasts eight years and results in either restored (70 out of 102 cases) or even improved (22 out of 102 cases) levels of democracy.³

Concerningly, the authors point out that the length of time a nation spends at the nadir of the U-Turn before rebounding is dictated by domestic politics. A liberal immigration game plan benefits short-term domestic politics by helping voters who are assessing candidates in primary elections to determine who will forcefully defend democracy and who will be overly cautious regime enablers. A blueprint will also ensure that when liberals regain power in the longer term, there are road maps to implement based on a full-throated defense of immigration as advantageous for the nation.

In this piece, I offer suggested reforms to the US immigration system. I propose ensuring accountability for the rogue agencies ICE and CBP, fundamentally restructuring immigration enforcement (including moving away from carceral approaches and transforming immigration courts into Article I courts), and making immigration legislation, as with the Farm Bill, a recurring feature of the congressional agenda. These proposals will guarantee accountability, streamline the system, install independent and lawful immigration enforcement, and remove the perverse incentives that have prevented progress on immigration.

Electoral tailwinds for a reform plan

It is necessary for liberals and their coalition partners to take a two-pronged approach that involves keeping up the fight against authoritarianism and drawing up plans for a restoration and reconstruction of American democracy in general and immigration policy in particular. In the absence of a strong opposition party, voters will have to vote out the fainthearted Democratic incumbents one by one.

A gap has opened between rank-and-file voters and their elected officials, caused by the unresponsiveness of the Democratic Party’s leaders to voters’ concerns. Citizens need to see candidates running on some kind of vision rather than merely not continuing what the Trump administration has done. If anything, recent polling as well as a focus group have shown that the electorate is angry at incumbent Democrats for being too weak, not for being too progressive.^4,5

I am not suggesting that liberals create public policy with a finger in the wind. However, there is a huge electoral opportunity for political candidates who distinguish themselves from establishment Democratic ones. Citizens and residents are frustrated with Democratic leaders’ apparent need to message-test every talking point in an attempt to capture crossover voters instead of motivating their own citizenry to show up. Trump’s 2024 electoral victory was secured in part because of the Democratic Party’s inability to mobilize its own electorate.⁶

Two predictable trends in politics also suggest that liberals need to have an immigration reform plan ready. Immigration has for several decades been described as the third rail of American politics. Yet Trump weaponized this third rail and rode it to victory. No doubt there is a political risk in overcorrecting and going too far to the left if liberals regain power. But given the excesses of the administration on immigration, that should be less of a worry.

One anticipated move in public opinion is a “thermostatic” effect, observable in public-policy areas like government spending on defense, welfare, and health. Matt Grossmann summarizes:⁷

Public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of policy, a well established regularity across democracies known as thermostatic politics. When military, health, or welfare spending goes up, Americans want less spending. When spending goes down, they want more. That’s frustrating the policy makers, but may represent democracy in action.

Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, authors of a 2022 book on thermostatic public opinion, Information and Democracy, find that the public’s beliefs are based on mostly accurate television and newspaper coverage of government policy spending.⁸

They indicate that thermostatic properties have a democratic reinforcing component. As Soroka explains:

So the purpose of representative democracy is to produce public policy that matches public preferences. And that requires not just that governments are responsive to publics, but also that publics are responsive to government actions. Citizens in the aggregate at least need to have some basic sense for what governments are doing so they can hold governments accountable, and also so they can have informed preferences worth representing in the first place.

Soroka and Wlezien’s research confirms the findings of other public-opinion scholars that the public, not just the most well-informed among us, knows enough to follow the direction and spending of government policies in order to form an opinion about whether the government has gone too far in specific policy areas.

While certain policy areas are not exhibiting a thermostatic outcome, immigration definitely is, with public opinion on enforcement swinging strongly against the administration. The next government should not only run on a vehement pro-immigration and anticorruption platform, but it also needs to know that doing so will help its electoral chances.

The strong tailwind of thermostatic effects is reinforced by what political scientists have called “one of the few empirical laws of political science,” the “cost of ruling” effect, where the party in power always loses congressional seats in the midterm elections.⁹

Because of the probable swings in the US electoral system that favor Democratic wins, liberals must be prepared to make sweeping structural reforms while they have the chance and not spend their time in office drawing up plans.

Ensuring accountability

Americans are recoiling at the brazen rights abuses in immigration enforcement and craving accountability. Among the factors causing the broad public backlash against immigration enforcement are the violent tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents to apprehend immigrants, brutalize peaceful protesters and journalists, and kill three US citizens.¹⁰ There is also a steady stream of disturbing media reports of squalid, disease-ridden conditions at detention camps, where up to fifty to seventy migrants are crowded into a cell with one toilet and with inadequate food and healthcare.¹¹

Further contributing to the public revulsion of immigration enforcement is that many Trump supporters voted for him believing that he would deport violent criminals, drug dealers, and gang members. Instead, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which receives regular data dumps from the federal government, by February 2026 more than 73.6 percent of the 68,289 migrants currently in ICE detention did not have a criminal violation, only a violation of their immigration status, which is civil in nature.¹²

ICE and CBP have become rogue agencies. Their agents are masked and unidentifiable and therefore unaccountable. Agency officials have shot and killed or wounded US citizens, abducted and detained other, mostly Latino citizens, and broken laws by apprehending large numbers of immigrants, who’d shown up at asylum hearings to comply with immigration laws, in courthouses across the country. This is only a partial list of the rights violations committed by ICE, CBP, and other federal-enforcement agents flooding US communities and sowing fear.¹³

ICE in particular has lost substantial public approval. In a March 3, 2026, YouGov poll, respondents wanted accountability, as exhibited by this finding:

If ICE is not abolished, majorities of Americans would like to limit ICE officers’ ability to act with anonymity. Three-quarters (75%) of Americans say that ICE officers should be required to wear uniforms that identify them as part of ICE. Only 14% say they should not.

In the same poll, for the first time, a majority supported eliminating ICE altogether. That percentage reached “50% with only 39% opposing the abolishment of the agency.” The general public desires accountability and supports the shutdown of the agency.¹⁴

Transitional justice remedies

One essential element of liberal reform is for the new administration to consult transitional-justice scholars about the best practices to heal the republic and to restore trust and legitimacy in government. Transitional justice is necessary when a nation suffers “systemic and widespread violations of human rights.” Its goal is to gain “recognition for the victims and to promote possibilities for peace, reconciliation and democracy.” Transitional-justice procedures can take many forms, including and not limited to criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, and reparations.¹⁵

One component of transitional justice is security system reform, which the United Nations describes as “seek[ing] to transform the military, police, judiciary and related state institutions from instruments of repression and corruption into instruments of public service and integrity.”¹⁶ This is where immigration reforms come in.

Given the cratering of public support for ICE and CBP, procedures similar to de-Ba’athification after Saddam Hussein’s rule ended are needed. Before our country can move forward, people working in immigration enforcement need to be accountable for civil-rights and human-rights abuses, not to mention corruption and self-dealing. But that effort must focus on the actual conduct of the people instead of using shortcuts based on party affiliation or an institutional hierarchy (or rank) in federal agencies. One study, for example, serves as a warning of how the de-Ba’athification attempts erred in dismissing large numbers of people from government without due process, thus destabilizing the new Iraqi government.¹⁷

Defund ICE and CBP, scrap DHS

Holding bad actors accountable for the legal and human-rights violations of migrants is a necessary but insufficient condition for reform. The Department of Homeland Security, especially CBP and ICE, must be defunded and dismantled. In the next liberal administration, there must be a root and branch rejection of the institutions that were weaponized against migrants and used to surveil and brutalize US citizens and residents.

DHS agencies are also hoovering resources from other federal agencies, making everyone in the US less safe. The federal government has reassigned “thousands” of federal personnel who were investigating illicit Iranian oil or working to combat human smuggling and sex trafficking, and it has diverted Coast Guard search-and-rescue planes to ICE or another arm of DHS to locate and round up migrants.¹⁸

The scale of DHS’s co-option of other federal agency resources is staggering. An ICE document published by the Cato Institute think tank shows that “more than 25,000” personnel from various federal agencies had been reassigned to ICE. David J. Bier, the author of the report, highlights that:

This diversion is not a small part of many of these agencies. It includes one in five US marshals (650 of 3,892), one in five FBI agents (2,840 of 13,700), half of DEA agents (2,181 of 4,620), over two-thirds of the ATF (1,778 of 2,572), and nearly 90 percent of Homeland Security Investigations (6,198 of 7,100).¹⁹

DHS has exceeded its (dubious) usefulness and is engaging in major mission creep. Instead of tasking its agencies with enhancing security, the administration is using its resources to commit human-rights and due-process violations. When DHS was created in 2001 following the 9/11 terror attacks, it was the largest reorganization of the federal government since FDR’s New Deal. An orderly dismantling and demobilization of DHS resources would be a contrast to the pell-mell ramp-up of the behemoth agency’s creation in 2001.

Many critics at the time of DHS’s inception raised alarms that subsuming immigration policy into national security would lead to due-process and privacy violations for all.²⁰ Those concerns proved prescient as Muslim Americans and their communities bore the brunt of overt and secret government surveillance. The Patriot Act and other 9/11-era laws created institutions and processes that eased the US government’s ability to spy on its citizens, all in the name of counterterrorism efforts.²¹ These laws, processes, and overfunded agencies are now being used against migrants, legal residents, and US citizens who are simply living their lives or engaging in First Amendment–protected activities. DHS has made all people less safe and their privacy less secure. The agency needs to be dismantled and its component parts either abolished or left as stand-alone agencies.

Given the scale of rights abuses in US immigration enforcement, the worry is less about overcorrection than about inaction. As a scholar who recently completed a book on the legal history of US immigration and citizenship, I find the Republicans’ inability to punish former Confederates who betrayed their country when the Reconstruction period ended is a lesson in doing too little. The political and economic effects of Reconstruction’s failure are manifold and profound, affecting every aspect of American life to this day.

Streamline the immigration system and remove perverse incentives

The US immigration system is byzantine, expensive, and ineffective in enforcing compliance with immigration laws. The system’s relenting focus on restrictionism does not address the complex variables pushing people to leave their countries and seek asylum protection here. As a result, backlogs pervade multiple parts of the system, from visa wait times to more than three million cases on the immigration court dockets. These bottlenecks create incentives for unauthorized migration and contribute to the public perception that the borders are not well-defended.

Exacerbating the logjams are several perverse incentive structures that are in the immigration and American political systems. Here I explain how to streamline the system in order to lessen the effects of two of these incentives.

More frequent and predictable intervals for changes to immigration

The first perverse incentive is the infrequency of comprehensive immigration reform. The lack of this for more than a half century has allowed the executive branch, in the form of a demagogue like Donald Trump, to step into the vacuum to fashion his and Stephen Miller’s immigration policy.

The US has not undertaken meaningful immigration reform since the Immigration Act of 1965. That space has been filled by Trump’s aggressive changes, supported by the GOP-dominated Congress. The landmark 1965 law was a sharp break with the previous system, which selected people based on racist national-origin-based numerical quotas. Consistent with the civil rights movement’s egalitarian goals, the US moved to a national-origin-neutral selection system to grant green cards for long-term immigrants by holding each country to a 20,000-per-country limit. The 1965 act prioritized family reunification over employment visas by reserving the lion’s share of green cards for close family members of US citizens and lawful permanent residents. That structure has remained roughly the same since then.

There have been significant targeted pieces of legislation since 1965, like the Refugee Act of 1980, the Immigration Act of 1986, the Immigration Act of 1990, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996, the Anti-Terrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and others that have changed the immigration system. But while all of these were important modifications, none were a thorough overhaul. If the last time the US revamped its immigration system was sixty-one years ago, the political effects of an outdated system can have unintended effects—as we are witnessing now in the rise of Trump and his platform of demonizing immigrants.

The US immigration system needs comprehensive legislation more frequently than every half century. This move would defuse immigration as an explosive issue to prevent it from being weaponized by illiberal political entrepreneurs. However the US decides to allocate permanent immigration status among family-reunification, employment, and temporary visas, these rebalancing efforts have to occur more regularly than sixty-plus years apart.

The stakes for immigration reform need to be lowered so that infrequent comprehensive reform efforts do not become knock-down-drag-out cage matches. In 2016, before I knew the result of the presidential election, I advocated for a process like the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a.k.a. the Farm Bill, to recalibrate green-card numbers in regular intervals (approximately every six years) to reflect evolving needs.²² One can quibble about whether the Farm Bill mechanism is transferable to the reauthorization of immigration visas, but the bottom line is that changes to the system need to be made far more often so that pressures do not build up. Perhaps once a decade, the visa numbers and categories could be revisited in a more predictable manner.

The Farm Bill funding procedure forces rural-farming interests and urban-based nutrition programs to compromise or no one gets funded. A similar feature could make any visa-number reauthorizations contingent on compromise among family-reunification advocates, humanitarian organizations, and businesses.

Given how politically explosive immigration has become, one of my immigration-law professor friends balked at the periodic reauthorization, believing that the conflict we see now would simply become more routine. But regularized allocations of visa numbers would ratchet down the intensity of the fights. If stakeholders realized that each negotiation point was not a one-off opportunity to fashion policy for another half century or more, over time the conflicts might deescalate.

Creating a more flexible set of punishments for immigration violations

The rigid punishment system for people who have violated immigration laws has created another perverse incentive ripe for abuse. The default to incarceration has led to many negative, expensive, and deadly consequences. The US, even across the Democratic administrations of Obama and Biden, decided that the way to penalize migrants who have violated civil immigration laws is to incarcerate them.

There are alternatives to punishing migrants for immigration-law violations that would offer them a chance to get right under the law. Law professor Peter L. Markowitz correctly observes that detention has not decreased the size of the undocumented population but instead has visited “disproportionate brutality” on noncitizens and their families and is “fiscal irresponsibility.”²³ He carefully considers the alternatives, having observed the consequences at the end of the first Trump administration.

The US does not have to default to detention. For example, Obama at least tried the Family Case Management Program, which was effective in keeping families together and out of detention, at the cost of thirty-six dollars a day.²⁴ That pilot program, until Trump canceled it, also produced high levels of migrants showing up for their immigration court dates.

Markowitz proposes other substantive rule changes to streamline the sprawling statutes governing deportation. He also suggests alternatives to detention that provide proportional punishment after judges consider the totality of a person’s circumstances, including their length of time in the country and their ties to local communities. He counsels that instead of facing “unnecessarily severe deprivations of liberty,” people can get right with the law through a system of “cooperative enforcement.” For instance, they can pay “a proportionate fine commensurate with their financial means.” A period of conditional residence could begin, requiring completion of a treatment or community-service program before admission into lawful long-term permanent housing.

The default to punishment for immigration violations has created financial incentives for private interests to lobby for more enforcement and detention. Big money is at stake. A multibillion-dollar private migrant detention network that predates the Trump administration has spawned a whole set of corporate interests in favor of high migrant apprehension and detention numbers. Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic are reaping substantial revenue. As the nonpartisan and independent Open Secrets organization reports, “In a 2023 report, GEO Group noted Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts accounted for 43 percent of its revenue; for CoreCivic that number was 30 percent. The day after Donald Trump was reelected, the companies’ stock prices soared: GEO Group’s by about 41 percent and CoreCivic’s by nearly 29 percent.”²⁵

It’s also important to acknowledge the necessity of migration and the strength of noncitizens’ ties within American communities by reducing the categories of people who can be deported. Currently only US citizens can never be deported; Markowitz recommends adding lawful permanent residents (green-card holders) to that protected group.²⁶ Similarly, immigration historian Mae Ngai suggests a five- to ten-year statute of limitations on deportations, noting that the National Origins Act of 1924 had such a provision.²⁷

Streamlining the immigration system would have the added benefit of removing the monetization of detention and saving billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. These changes would create a more humane process that does not resort to cruel and expensive detention. Existing punishment schemes are ineffective in forcing more compliance with US immigration laws and do not recognize the deep ties that bind immigrants to American communities. The binary of allowing someone to stay or mandating their deportation does not address the complex factors leading people to migrate and become embedded in their neighborhoods.

Installing independent adjudicators in the immigration bureaucracy

The current rights abuses and arrogation of executive power are enabled by Trump’s removal of independent checks with the help of a GOP-controlled Congress. Reforms intended to rebuild American institutions must ensure that independent adjudicators are installed. Only when agencies and their personnel are free from political, electoral, or fiscal retaliation can they effectively police abuses of power.

The immigration courts are the first stop for migrants contesting their removal. They adjudicate the largest number of immigration claims, since few immigrants can afford to appeal if they lose. Judges in these courts, while referred to as immigration judges (IJs), do not receive lifelong tenure like Article III US District Court judges, US Court of Appeals judges, and US Supreme Court Justices.

Although their closest counterparts are administrative-law judges of other executive-branch agencies like Social Security and the National Labor Relations Board, IJs do not enjoy the same protections under the Administrative Procedures Act. They are “actually career attorneys within the DOJ, reporting through a ‘chain of command’ to the Attorney General.”²⁸ IJs are hired by the attorney general and immigration courts are under the executive branch.

This structure is ripe for abuse. In George W. Bush’s administration, staff members under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were accused of illegally hiring IJs in a partisan manner.²⁹ The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) that sits at the top of the administrative-agency appeals process is plagued by similar flaws of susceptibility to political pressure and lack of independence. For this reason, IJs have not for some time provided reasoned or consistent decisions rooted in law and facts in their adjudications.³⁰

Given the ease of hiring and firing IJs and BIA members, it is possible for presidents to use ideological litmus tests when hiring new ones. It is no surprise that when Trump took office, especially in his second term, he went on a spree of purging IJs and replacing them with judges who had enforcement or military backgrounds.³¹ The same happened at the BIA.³² Trump has cleared the immigration courts of any judges who are not hardliners and is stacking the deck for high denial rates.

We know from existing research that an IJ’s work experience correlates strongly with their asylum grant rates. Our NSF-funded research confirmed previous studies’ findings that IJs with enforcement backgrounds have a much higher asylum denial rate than those who worked in academia, private practice, or community-based organizations. We found that IJs in the former category “had a denial rate of 76.5%, compared to the 50.3% rate of judges without an enforcement background.”³³

In our first article from the NSF grant, we explained the consequences of IJs being part of the executive branch. After our presentation of qualitative and quantitative data, we laid out a series of policy recommendations for immigration court reform. Our main recommendation is for immigration courts to be made into “real courts” by becoming Article I courts. Congress would create the new courts, delineating their functions and their structure. This move would take the immigration courts out of the executive branch and bring them in line with the hiring and firing norms of independence and insulation from the DOJ. IJs would only be removed for cause, with clear establishment of criteria for appointments in rejection of ideological tests. This idea is not new, having been supported by numerous scholars, the American Bar Association, a member of the Federal Bar Association, and IJs themselves.³⁴

The current immigration bureaucracy has been turned into a deportation machine that processes people at risk without meaningful review of their situation or reasoned, impartial, and consistent applications of law to facts.³⁵ As is, the system falls far short of what citizens of a democracy expect out of courts. Creating political independence for the immigration courts must be at the top of the list of liberal reforms.

Conclusion

US democracy remains under sustained assault, with new dangers emerging each day. No doubt many will see this set of proposals as unrealistic or insufficient. Indeed, it is daunting that reforms have to happen both in multiple policy areas and across sectors of the government. Instead of being overwhelmed or immobilized by the enormousness of the task, liberals and coalition partners must put forth affirmative visions of a new immigration system. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Many thoughtful individuals and organizations have already proposed reforms; starting with those plans would go a long way.

Smart Americans can walk and chew gum at the same time. Just as climate scientists continue to fight an uphill battle against climate change while undertaking mitigation measures, liberals can slow the deportation machine by creating friction while advancing humane and sensible affirmative policy proposals on immigration. The costs of not doing enough are severe for our fragile democracy.

1. Jack Rakove, “It’s Not a Constitutional Crisis in the Trump Era. It’s a Constitutional Failure,” Washington Monthly, June 27, 2025.
2. Bright Line Watch Survey, “The Persistence of Diminished Democracy in a Second Trump Presidency,” 2026.
3. Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo, Martin Lundstedt, Felix Wiebrecht, and Staffan I. Lindberg, “When Autocratization Is Reversed: Episodes of U-Turns Since 1900,” Democratization Vol. 32, no. 5 (2025).
4. G. Elliott Morris, “New Poll: Democrats’ Real Problem Isn’t Being Too Liberal—It’s Being Seen as Too Weak,” Strength in Numbers, February 27, 2026.
5. New York Times, “Opinion: ‘Show Up for Us’: Thirteen Democratic Voters on Trump, ICE, and Their Frustrations With the Democratic Party,” February 17, 2026.
6. Michael C. Bender, “Why Was There a Broad Drop-Off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?”, New York Times, November 13, 2024.
7. Niskanen Center, “How Does the Public Move Right When Policy Moves Left?”, February 23, 2022.
8. Ibid.
9. The Undercurrent Encyclopedia, “The Cost of Ruling.”
10. Dan Gooding and Billal Rahman, “Third American Death Linked to ICE Crackdown Uncovered by Newsweek,” Newsweek, February 23, 2026.
11. United States Senate, “Fact Sheet: Immigration Detention Oversight. What Is It Really Like to Be in ICE Detention?”, July 18, 2025.
12. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, February 2026, “Immigration Detention: Quick Facts.”
13. Nicole Foy, “We Found That More Than 170 US Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They Have Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days,” ProPublica, October 16, 2025.
14. YouGov, “Support for Abolishing ICE Reaches 50%,” March 3, 2026.
15. International Center for Transitional Justice, “What Is Transitional Justice?”, 2008.
16. Ibid.
17. Miranda Sissons and Abdualrazzaq Al-Saiedi, “A Bitter Legacy: Lessons of De-Baathification in Iraq,” International Center for Transitional Justice, March 2013.
18. Nicholas Nehamas, Michael H. Keller, Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Homeland Security Missions Falter Amid Focus on Deportations,” New York Times, November 16, 2025.
19. David J. Bier, “ICE Has Diverted Over 25,000 Officers From Their Jobs,” Cato at Liberty, September 3, 2025.
20. American Civil Liberties Union, “Surveillance Under the Patriot Act.”
21. Saher Khan and Vignesh Ramachandran, “Post 9/11 Surveillance Has Left a Generation of Muslim Americans in a Shadow of Distrust and Fear,” PBS News, September 16, 2015.
22. Anna O. Law, “Cooler Heads,” The Miller Center First Year Project, May 25, 2016.
23. Peter L. Markowitz, “Rethinking Immigration Enforcement,” Florida Law Review Vol. 73, no. 5 (September 2021): 1033–79.
24. Jane C. Timm, “This Obama-Era Pilot Program Kept Asylum-Seeking Migrant Families Together. Trump Canceled It,” NBC News, June 24, 2018.
25. Indy Scholtens, “Private Prison Companies Positioned to Benefit From Increased Deportations,” Open Secrets, April 23, 2025.
26. Markowitz, “Rethinking Immigration Enforcement.”
27. Mae Ngai, “Opinion: Immigration’s Border-Enforcement Myth,” New York Times, January 28, 2018.
28. Fatma E. Marouf, “Executive Overreaching in Immigration Adjudication,” Tulane Law Review Vol. 93, no. 4 (2019): 707–85.
29. Ari Shapiro, “Tracing Patterns in Politicized Hiring at Justice Department,” National Public Radio, July 29, 2008.
30. Phillip G. Schrag, Andrew I. Schoenholtz, and Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform, New York: New York University Press, April 2011.
31. Geoff Bennett and Ali Schmitz, “Ousted Immigration Judge Describes Deepening Court Backlog,” PBS News, November 12, 2025.
32. Britain Eakin, “Trump Admin to Nearly Halve Immigration Appeals Board,” Law360, February 20, 2025.
33. Karen Musalo, Anna O. Law, Annie Daher, Katharine M. Donato, and Chelsea Meiners, “With Fear, Favor, and Flawed Analysis: Decision Making in US Immigration Courts,” Boston College Law Review Vol. 65, no. 8 (October 2024): 2743–2800.
34. Ibid.
35. William Roberts, “The Mass Deportation Machine,” International Bar Association, March 25, 2026.