This report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation by Dorsey & Whitney LLP of the affect of U.S. immigration law and enforcement policy on U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants. The principle authors of this report are Dorsey partners James D. Kremer and Joseph W. Hammell, and University of St. Thomas Adjunct Professor and immigration attorney Kathleen A. Moccio.
Read the Report with Appendices (8 MB) (PDF)
Selection from the report:
Of the approximately 5 million children of undocumented immigrants residing in the United States, more than 3 million are U.S. citizens. Born here, these children derive their citizenship from the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Current immigration law and enforcement policy is marginalizing what it means for these children to be U.S. citizens.
Increased interior immigration enforcement action by ICE, in the form of highprofile worksite raids and home raids, has resulted in the arrest, detention and deportation of record numbers of undocumented immigrants over the past several years. In the process, tens of thousands of children of undocumented immigrants, including citizen children, have seen their families torn apart, or experienced the effective deportation of the entire family to countries as foreign to them as they are to other American children. The harm threatened or visited upon the citizen child in these circumstances is palpable and long-lasting.
U.S. citizen children are the victims of immigration laws that are out of step with the manner in which we address child welfare issues in other areas of the law. The “best interests” of the child find little or no hearing in the process of detaining and deporting undocumented parents. The harm suffered by the citizen child who loses a parent to deportation, or the citizen child who loses his or her prospective future in the United States in the interest of maintaining family unity, is thus the natural consequence of systemic shortcomings in U.S. immigration law and policy.
The primary goal of this report is to reveal, and to prompt meaningful and reasoned debate regarding, the deficiencies in this country’s immigration laws and enforcement scheme relative to the interests of our citizen children. Our hope is that this discussion will lead to a more humane immigration policy that does not dismiss the harm to the citizen child as unavoidable, collateral damage.