Digital Commons @ UDC Law (University of the District of Columbia Law Library)
Not a member yet
840 research outputs found
Sort by
Letter to DHS Outlines Problematic Practices that Undermine Due Process Protections for Asylum Seekers
No full text
The \u27New Selma\u27 and the Old Selma: Arizona, Alabama, and the Immigration Civil Rights Movement in the Twenty-first Century
No full textIn his unfinished manuscript, “The Politics of Expulsion: A Short History of Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law, HB 56,” the late Raymond A. Mohl, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, directly and succinctly identified the true nature of the motivations behind the passage of HB 56 in the Alabama legislature. Professor Mohl observed that “nativist fears of large numbers of ethnically different newcomers, especially over job competition and unwanted cultural change, sometimes referred to as “cultural dilution,” provided political cover for politicians who sought to control and regulate immigration within state borders, but also to push illegal immigrants out.” By recognizing that HB 56 and other anti-immigrant laws that followed nationwide in the wake of SB 1070 were driven by racist and nativist politicians, Professor Mohl cut directly to the issue when he commented that “the state’s harsh, aggressive, and discriminatory anti-immigrant policy also brought back memories from a half-century earlier, when state-sponsored racial discrimination targeted African Americans.
What Does it Mean to be an Ally in the Movement Towards Justice. KARAMAH DC Black History Month Discussion
No full text
From Surviving to Thriving? An Investigation of Asylee Integration in the United States
No full textThis article assesses the efficacy of the legal framework for asylees, individuals granted refugee status within the United States, through an examination of the human outcomes following the grant of asylum. To understand how the asylee benefits system actually functions, I conducted more than fifty field interviews with advocates, service providers, and government officials in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. This research fills a conspicuous gap in our understanding of what happens after the grant of asylum and reveals a number of insights about the ways in which the prevailing laws, policies, and programs yield suboptimal outcomes, even given the limited resources presently devoted to asylee integration. Interviews yielded important findings, including that the current legal structure and attendant administrative programs push asylees quickly into survival jobs, which are often a stark mismatch for their education and skills. For educated asylees, these survival jobs impede both English language acquisition, which is critical to successful integration, and re-credentialing to allow recognition of education and expertise acquired overseas. For less educated asylees, the rush to employment in a survival job similarly delays and potentially undermines successful integration and may result in future costs to counties, states, and the federal government. The subsequent financial distress asylees experience plays a role in housing instability and delays in applying for permanent residence. These problems are compounded by limited ongoing mental health treatment for asylees, who are often survivors of torture or trauma, and delays in the family reunification process
Reversing The School-To-Prison Pipeline: Initial Findings From The District of Columbia On The Efficacy of Training and Mobilizing Court-Appointed Lawyers to Use Special Education Advocacy on Behalf of At-Risk Youth
No full textThis article will describe the implementation and analyze the results of an attorney training and mobilizing project of the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic (Clinic) 1 of the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law (UDC-DCSL).2 This project was premised in part on the notion that many of the children caught in the District of Columbia\u27s school-to-prison pipeline have disabilities that significantly affect their ability to learn, and that many of these children therefore encounter, more than other children, conflict with school personnel and failure in school. These children disproportionately repeat grades, face school exclusion (suspension and expulsion), and leave school without graduating