Immigration and Criminal Law: Immigration Consequences of Crimes and Criminalizing Migration – 6718

Spring 2022

In the last decade, there has been an increased emphasis on using the criminal justice system to help determine who is and who is not suitable to live and work in the United States. This phenomenon has had some increasingly interesting effects as the immigration apparatus has been for most of the history of the United States a civil and agency system. The increased reliance on the criminal justice system has caused some overlap of criminal justice norms- including concepts of right to counsel, detention and detainers and warrants. At the same time, the prosecution of federal migration crimes has skyrocketed in the same period to the point where the majority of all federal prisoners are imprisoned because of migration crimes.