The birthright citizenship case and immigration raids have drawn headlines and national attention, but Lucas Guttentag, who teaches immigration law at Stanford and Yale law schools, says some of the Trump administration’s most consequential immigration changes are unfolding with far less public scrutiny.

Guttentag, one of the nation’s leading immigration law experts and founder of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, joins host Professor Pamela Karlan for a wide-ranging conversation about current American immigration policies. Guttentag discusses his time in the Biden administration and compares policies in the first Trump administration with those of the second. He also focuses on the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, an effort he launched in 2017 with law students to document every Trump administration immigration policy, implementation memo, directive, and related legal challenge. The tracker, he explains, is designed to make visible what can otherwise be hard to see: hundreds of policy changes that, taken together, are reshaping the immigration system.

The episode examines what these changes mean for immigration courts, bond hearings, temporary protected status, green card applications, and the lawyers challenging the administration in court. One of Guttentag’s central points is that immigration is a civil system, not a criminal one, and the distinction matters for anyone trying to understand what is happening now.

Links:

Connect:

(00:00:00) The Immigration Policy Tracking Project

(00:07:33) The Dismantling of the Immigration Court System

(00:12:15) "Public Spectacle and Private Terror" — Tactics of Fear 

(00:17:32) Asylum, TPS, and the Racial Undercurrent

(00:21:51) The Courts Push Back 

(00:29:22) What a Rebuilt Immigration System Would Look Like 

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