I know it has been a while since my last post, but I was waiting for some big news regarding Comprehensive Immigration Reform ("CIR"), and finally that news has come. The news is it's not happening, or at least while U.S. President Barack Obama remains in office.
So where does that leave us? With the unlikelihood that the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ("Fifth Circuit"), which last heard
oral argument in the matter about four months ago, will issue an order permitting the
U.S. Government to institute the U.S. President's announced Executive
Actions of November 20, 2014, i.e., DACA's Expansion and DAPA, many
undocumented individuals in the U.S. feel that they are without hope to
resolve their immigration-related problems.
However, the silver lining, if any, in Speaker Ryan's comments above
is the room for negotiation on the issue of enforcement, despite the intransigence
on the issue of benefits. There may be room for compromise in an area
concerning enforcement but that nonetheless still could lead to a benefit,
particularly for foreign nationals with certain criminal history. Less
than a week ago many saw with their own eyes what had been
announced less than a month prior with the release by the U.S. Sentencing Commission
of 6,000 federal inmates sooner than their sentences permitted. Unfortunately,
a third of those federal inmates face the prospect of deportation from the U.S.
despite such release because they are not U.S. citizens. Their release
from federal-prison custody likely was not met with the type of joy the
other two thirds of the released federal prisoners presumably experienced
just a few days ago.
So far the discussion about criminal-sentence reform has mainly focused on
how the U.S. government can pursue it and whether
mass incarceration is really a good policy. This discussion is necessarily intertwined with the perceived failure
of the "War on Drugs" pursued by the U.S. since the 1980s, expanded
in the 1990s, and continued until today with the exponential increase
of non-violent drug offenders within prisons and jails across the U.S.
but with no discernible decline in the trafficking and usage of illegal
narcotics. This "illegality" policy, meaning the criminalization
of what essentially is a disease, an addiction, or at the very least a
recreation, has also plagued the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act
("INA"), which for the most part renders any non-U.S. citizen
other than maybe a person who has a Lawful-Permanent-Resident card ("Green
Card") and who has resided continuously in the U.S. for at least
seven years before committing his/her first drug-related offense, both
removable from the U.S. and without hope for relief from such removal.
A dismantling or overhaul of the U.S. "War on Drugs" should
include a commensurate reform of the INA relating to penalties for controlled-substances
violations. As a practitioner, it amazes me how many foreign-national
adults face removal because of non-violent drug-related experimentation
when they were younger, something in which many young U.S. citizens engage
as well. This reform need not be styled in a manner as a benefit to foreign
nationals but rather be instituted as a smarter enforcement approach.
Thereafter, and only if such reform is successful in easing the burden
on enforcement resources that pursuing non-violent drug offenders necessarily
involves, maybe the overall "illegality" policy to the INA may
be reformed as well.