About Lory Rosenberg

Lory Diana Rosenberg was Interim Director of Policy and Advocacy, Refugee and Migrantís Rights, at Amnesty International USA. She is the founder and owner of Immigration Defense & Expert Advocacy Solutions - IDEAS, which provides consultation, expert opinion, & mentoring services for attorneys, defenders, and other policymakers and professionals handling administrative and federal appeals, litigation, hearings, applications and policy matters involving immigration admissions, detention, removal, asylum, waivers, and the broader questions of fairness, civil liberties, and human rights. Ms. Rosenberg is co-author of Immigration Law and Crimes, and a national lecturer, writer, and trainer. She served as an appellate immigration judge on the Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 and 2002, deciding over 20,000 immigration appeals. She was rapporteur for the International Association of Refugee Law Judgesí ìParticular Social Groupî working party and contributed papers on best practices on elements in the United Nations Convention Relating To The Status of Refugees. Between 1997 to 2004, Ms. Rosenberg taught immigration law and policy, refugee and asylum law, and immigration law and crimes at Washington College of Law, American University. Upon leaving the Board, Ms. Rosenberg was a featured columnist for Benders Immigration Bulletin. She founded and directed the Defending Immigrants Partnership, an immigration collaboration based at NLADA, providing expertise, training, and support to public defenders and criminal defense counsel. Ms. Rosenberg has prior experience as the director of the Legal Action Center at the American Immigration Law Foundation, and was the founder and director of the legal representation and pro bono programs at Centro Presente. She previously represented individual clients in 2 premier immigration law practices in Boston, Massachusetts, and had her own immigration law practice. Ms. Rosenberg is an elected Director on AILAís Board of Governors, serving on the asylum and detention/removal committees, and AILAís right to counsel task force, and has been active in the immigrant and refugee rights community throughout her career.
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A State of Siege in Texas?

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced this week that the 1,200 National Guard troops that President Barack Obama ordered to the southwest border were deployed on Aug. 1, and hundreds of additional Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are being sent to the border to target dangerous criminals and help shore up security.

I asked Erica Schommer and Celestino Gallegos, Amnesty International members in Texas, what it’s been like living near the border. They were glad to set me straight!  They wrote:

If you are like most Americans, you probably believe that our southern border is under siege.  Recently, media coverage has had many people from D.C., New York, and other places far from the border talking about the crime and violence in the borderlands as if there was a crisis in the U.S.  For those of us who live on that border, the report released by the FBI was welcome news, confirming what many of us know:  statistics show that the border is safer than many places in the U.S.

We live ten miles from the Mexican border.  The increase in violence in Mexico has indeed impacted our lives: we do not go to Mexico nearly as much as we used to, and when we do, we are much more cautious. But no, the violence that has plagued Mexico since the inception of President Calderon’s war on the drug cartels has not “spilled-over” into the U.S. as many outside commentators have claimed.  Here in the U.S., life feels no different.

Nevertheless, pundits and opportunistic politicians have seized on the dramatic violence in Mexico to justify border militarization and undertake draconian immigration enforcement measures in the U.S.  While these measures may cater to the fears of the American public, they neither offer a long term humanitarian solution to our broken immigration system, nor provide any security to border residents.  Moreover, if adopted, these measures will result in significant human and civil rights violations of border residents.

We don’t want to live in a militarized zone. Would you? As it is, Border Patrol vehicles are a daily reminder of enforcement in our neighborhoods.  We don’t want to hear helicopters over head and see tanks stationed by the bridges, like there are on the Mexican side of the border.  We don’t want surveillance cameras in unmanned drones tracking our mundane daily activities.  It is not necessary and it is not welcome.

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A Small Victory for Arizonans, A Bigger Victory For Human Rights

Opponents of Arizona's immigration enforcement law SB 1070 embrace after a judge blocked some controversial provisions of the law on July 28, 2010 in Phoenix, Arizona. (c) John Moore/Getty Images

In a welcome, 11th hour order that prevents Arizona from putting into place much of its immigrant profiling law [SB1070], Judge Susan Bolton ruled that the offensive sections of the state law — authorizing police to check the papers of a person whom they reasonably suspect of being an illegal immigrant, requiring immigrants to carry their papers at all times, making it a crime for an undocumented immigrant to apply for work, and permitting the warrantless arrest of a person suspected of a crime that would make him deportable from the U.S. — will not go into effect July 29th as scheduled.

Amnesty International applauds Judge Bolton’s decision as a major victory for all those who support civil and human rights and oppose SB 1070.

The preliminary injunction issued by Judge Bolton means that the court views these sections of  SB1070 as likely to be found unconstitutional and permanently barred from taking effect.  The Court condemned mandatory immigration verification upon arrest, acknowledging that the portion of the law requiring that immigration status must be determined “before the person is released” would “inevitabl[y] increase the length of detention”  elevating it to unconstitutional proportions.

The Court also found the law impermissibly restricts the liberty of those in the U.S.  lawfully due to “the intrusion of police presence into the lives of legally-present aliens (and even United States citizens), who will necessarily be swept up” by enforcement of the law.

As Amnesty International USA consistently has pointed out in opposing SB1070, the law is based on unconstitutional racial profiling that targets any immigrant or citizen who may “look like an immigrant,” and violates the human right to be free from racial discrimination, live with one’s family, and enjoy freedom of movement in Arizona.  What is more, the flagrant imposition of detention on broad sections of the population without any standards or safeguards to prevent the unjustified deprivation of personal liberty cannot be tolerated.

The overreaching aspects of SB 1070,  struck down at least preliminarily in  the Court’s opinion, illustrate not only the need for reform of federal immigration law and policy,  but the need for state officials to observe and protect the constitutional and human rights of all persons within their jurisdiction. Today’s ruling should send a cautionary note to the several other state jurisdictions thinking of following the blatantly unconstitutional path taken by Arizona.

Utah's Immigrant Hit List

Last week, at least two Utah state employees were involved in distributing a list of 1,300 names of supposedly illegal immigrants. This 29-page list was sent out to Utah government offices and media and included such personalized details as social security numbers, addresses, and even pregnancy due dates. The Governor of Utah, Gary Herbert, told CNN’s John King on Friday night that those listed have Hispanic names and not all of them are in the state illegally.

While Herbert condemned the actions saying the “release of such private, sensitive information is deplorable”, it isn’t just the violation of privacy rights and the rogue behavior of public servants that makes this incident so troubling.  It is also the irrepressible undercurrent of racially-based targeting of those with Hispanic surnames as outsiders, creating a climate of intimidation and fear in communities of color and among people of foreign national origin.

As emphasized in the Amnesty Report Jailed Without Justice, all people, whatever their immigrant or citizenship status, have fundamental human rights which include the right to privacy and the right to be free from police harassment. Utah Attorney General Shurtleff  acknowledged:

“Clearly, it’s not even meant as a blacklist. It’s more like a hit list. It is, I think to put people at fear, to terrorize, to get people mobilized to do things.”

I agree. State policymakers and officials must understand that discriminatory stunts such as “listgate” don’t occur in a vacuum.  This incident has to be viewed in the larger political context of states like Utah’s neighbor Arizona rushing to adopt harsh and restrictive immigration initiatives without regard to the human rights violations involved. In fact,  no one has been able to demonstrate persuasively how it will be possible to enforce Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB1070, without resorting to racial profiling, a blatant human rights violation.

Nevertheless, without a court-issued injunction to stop it,  SB1070 will take effect next week, not only requiring police to arrest and detain anyone they reasonably suspect of being present in Arizona without a legal immigration status, but giving Arizona citizens the power to sue the police if they do not do so.  You can speak out against SB1070 by sending a message to your senators.

When governors and other public officials pass laws allowing themselves to abrogate the human rights they are otherwise obligated to uphold, it’s no wonder that state workers are emboldened to engage in lawless and discriminatory conduct that terrorizes communities. There’s simply no justification for violating human rights. What’s next? Tolerance of hate crimes?

Posted in USA