Olinger Law

Gone: the online EOIR Benchbook

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What are they afraid of? Professor Geoffrey A. Hoffman of the University of Houston Law Center is raising awareness about our government’s escalating removal of immigration resources from official federal websites. In a recent Yale Journal on Regulation blog post, Professor Hoffman calls it “scrubbing away” transparency and accountability.   The most recent victim: the EOIR… Read More »

Immigration court backlog: like “doing death-penalty cases in a traffic court setting.”

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Source: Houston Chronicle America’s immigration judges have long been overburdened and under-resourced. One immigration judge has compared her job to “doing death-penalty cases in a traffic-court setting.” The stakes are high, while support and procedural protections for noncitizens facing deportation are negligible. It’s no surprise, then, that immigration judges suffer greater stress and burnout than… Read More »

5 Reasons Why The Police Support Obama On Immigration

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Police chiefs, sheriffs and their organizations around the U.S. favor President Obama’s Deferred Action Policy which will give limited and temporary immigration benefits (such as the ability to temporarily stay and work in the U.S. with a federal ID card) to parents of U.S. citizens and green-card holders. They hope to persuade the Supreme Court… Read More »

Dallas Says No To ICE “Holds”

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  Dallas County says NO to ICE’s immigration holds.  As reported today by The Dallas Morning News, Dallas Co. Sheriff Valdez will no longer comply with ICE “detainer” requests to hold non-citizens for immigration. We have fought this battle for our clients for years, as we’ve previously posted. The holds were based on what law enforcement often called a… Read More »

Immigration Prisons Violate Federal Laws

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Immigration prisons routinely violate federal laws such as the Prison Rape Elimination Act.  The Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for detaining non-citizens, regularly violates their civil and constitutional rights in immigration prisons, known as “detention centers,” according to a fact-finding study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent bipartisan independent federal agency.  … Read More »

U.S. Citizen Children May Have Trouble Enrolling In Dallas ISD

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Dallas County Drawn Into Birth Certificate Debate by Julián Aguilar, The Texas Tribune August 5, 2015 Texas’ second-largest county has adopted a controversial policy that advocacy groups say could infringe on the civil rights of U.S. citizens born to undocumented parents. The Dallas County clerk’s office announced on its website that as of June 1 it no… Read More »

Jailed Immigrant Children Released

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The New York Times Opinion Pages | EDITORIAL A Judge’s Rebuke of Immigration Detention By THE EDITORIAL BOARD AUG. 5, 2015 Children do not belong in prison. The mass detention of families offends American values, a lesson this country learned long ago at Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain and the other Japanese-American internment camps of… Read More »

Visa Application Equality For Same-Sex Spouses

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The U.S. will immediately begin recognizing marriage equality in visa applications. The State Department today announced that the same benefits are available to all lawfully married persons – whether same-sex or opposite-sex.  The announcement was made in response to last month’s historic Supreme Court decision on DOMA’s unconstitutionality. “As long as a marriage has been… Read More »

Victory for Aliens! Local Texas Anti-Immigrant Housing Law (Still) Unconstitutional

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Still unconstitutional:  Trying to oust immigrants from Farmers Branch, Texas through discriminatory, anti-immigrant housing laws.  Farmers Branch’s Latino population is over 45%.  The Dallas suburb’s ordinance criminalized housing rentals to those immigrants it considered unlawfully present.  The law never took effect;  it was blocked from the outset by two previous court decisions. The Fifth Circuit Court of… Read More »