District Court in Texas Allows CHNV Parole Program to Continue
Last week, a decision by a federal district court in Texas keeps in place the parole program set up by the Biden administration to allow 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to enter the United States legally each month. Judge Drew Tipton of the Southern District of Texas dismissed the claims brought by several states challenging the legality of the CHNV parole program. Judge Tipton held that the state of Texas, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, did not show it would be harmed by the CHNV policy because it had successfully reduced overall border crossings.
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Differences in State Sunshine Laws Can Threaten Transparency Around Immigration Detention and Enforcement
The main way in which the public can access information about what the federal government is doing is through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). However, laws that allow the public to get state public records, also known as sunshine laws or public records laws, are different state by state. State and local government entities often interpret their respective state sunshine laws differently. As a result, requests for the exact same information can lead to records produced by an entity in one state and shielded from the public in another and, in some cases, released by one local government entity but not produced by another in the same state.
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Despite Progress, the Tragedy of Family Separation Can Never Be Undone
Six years ago, a man came to the U.S./Mexico border with his five-year-old daughter, looking for safety in the United States. But this was 2018—the era of family separation. As soon as the pair arrived at the border, Customs and Border Protection forcibly took the man’s daughter away. They sent him to a detention center, and his five-year-old was sent by herself to a separate facility on the other side of the country, 2,000 miles away. He wouldn’t be able to speak to her again for nearly a month.
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