Dr. Jennifer Chacón is the Bruce Tyson Mitchell Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.
On October 12, 2021, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memorandum directing the heads of the department’s immigration agencies—ICE, CBP, and USCIS—to “cease mass worksite operations,” thereby putting an end (at least for now) to a long-standing immigration enforcement technique that relied on mass arrests of workers at job sites. The Mayorkas memo declared such enforcement operations to be insufficiently focused on “exploitative employers,” and inconsistent with the department’s recently articulated requirement of individualized assessments in enforcement actions. The underlying legal rules that have long facilitated such workplace raids remain in place, however. In a series of cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s, the Supreme Court authorized reliance on race as a factor in the enforcement of immigration laws, authorized workplace interrogations without requiring the articulation of individualized suspicion of the targets of such interrogations, and, in immigration proceedings, allowed for the introduction of evidence seized in workplace raids in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. These rulings remain good law. Drawing on previously published work and ongoing research, this talk explores the origins and consequences of these cases.
Direct questions about the event to Colloquium Committee members Dr. Amanda Geller (agellers@uci.edu), Dr. Miguel Quintana Navarrete (miguelrq@uci.edu), Dr. Carolina Valdivia (c.valdivia@uci.edu) and Anthony Triola (atriola@uci.edu).
