Fighting Immigration Enforcement

For more than two decades, the National Immigration Project has provided legal support, training, and technical assistance to noncitizens, legal advocates, community groups, and families responding to immigration enforcement actions. In addition to being a leading source of cutting-edge legal strategies, the National Immigration Project develops community resource materials to build greater awareness about draconian enforcement actions and the toll exacted upon families and communities.

During the last decade and a half, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), with financial backing from Congress, have assembled an extensive array of programs and operations designed to “crack down” on immigrants. Through these programs, nearly 400,000 noncitizens are arrested each year in their homes and apartments, workplaces, traffic stops, on the street, at the border, and in our criminal justice system – often as a result of partnerships between state and local authorities.

With one in five families in the United States having mixed immigration status, the policies of DHS and DOJ often result in dislocation and severe disruption for communities and families.There are 30,000 noncitizens in detention in the U.S. on any given day, who are at particular risk because they are transferred hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from their families, communities, and lawyers, to prisons run mostly by counties or by private companies. In the face of vast government resources, the current reality is one of overreaching enforcement tactics that violate basic civil rights of noncitizens.

We work to ensure that all immigrants are treated fairly under immigration laws and our Constitution.