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CLEAR | Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law
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Publisher's Description
The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was supposed to be a stepping stone, a policy innovation announced by the White House designed to put pressure on Congress for a broader, lasting set of legislative changes. Those changes never materialized, and the people who hoped to benefit from them have been forced to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by these unfulfilled promises. Legal Phantoms tells their story.
After Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013, President Obama pivoted in 2014 to supplementing DACA with a deferred action program (known as DAPA) for the parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents and a DACA expansion (DACA+) in 2014. But challenges from Republican-led states prevented even these programs from going into effect. Interviews with would-be applicants, immigrant-rights advocates, and government officials reveal how such failed immigration-reform efforts continue to affect not only those who had hoped to benefit, but their families, communities, and the country in which they have made an uneasy home. Out of the ashes of these lost dreams, though, people find their own paths forward through uncharted legal territory with creativity and resistance.
About the Authors
Jennifer M. Chacón researches issues that arise at the nexus of immigration law, constitutional law, and criminal law and procedure. Her writings elucidate how legal frameworks on immigration and law enforcement shape individual and collective understandings of racial and ethnic identity, citizenship, civic engagement, and social belonging. She is the co-author of the immigration law textbook Immigration Law and Social Justice, now in its second edition, and the co-author of Legal Phantoms (Stanford University Press, 2024), which explores how the past decade’s shifting immigration policies have shaped, and been shaped by, immigrant communities and organizations in Southern California. She has written dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays on immigration, criminal law, constitutional law, and citizenship issues. Her research has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the University of California.
Susan Bibler Coutin holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and is professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where she also serves as Associate Dean of the Graduate Division. Her research has examined social, political, and legal activism surrounding immigration issues, particularly immigration from El Salvador to the United States. She is the author of Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence (2016), among many others.
Stephen Lee received his B.A. from Stanford University, his M.A. from UCLA, and his J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law. Previously, Professor Lee worked at Skadden, Arps, and clerked for Judge Mary Schroeder on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Prior to joining the UCI law faculty, he was a Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School.
Professor Lee writes about immigrants and immigration law. Past scholarship has addressed how enforcement realities constrain immigration law and policy across a variety of contexts, including the workplace, the criminal justice system, the food industry, and our banking system; the legal, political, and empirical significance of deferred action programs; and how the law enables violence across the immigration system.