Deborah Anker

Asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S. through Tijuana are out of luck for now, as U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reached capacity at its San Diego ports of entry, an agency spokesman told KPBS in an email on Wednesday...Deborah Anker, a clinical professor of law and founder of the Harvard Law School's Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, said the move is a violation of Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention. "There's no question that this violates the statute, it violates our treaty obligations," she said. "You can't turn people away at the border. That's very fundamental ... It's not a gray area."

President Trump scaled back his executive order barring migrants from several predominantly Muslim countries Monday, in an attempt to insulate the controversial rules from a flurry of legal challenges and critics. The new executive order, which will be phased in starting March 16, removes Iraq from the list of original list of seven banned countries. The switch came after the Iraqi government, a key ally in the fight against the Islamic State, decried the initial order and worked with the State Department on mutually agreeable vetting procedures...However, Deborah Anker, an immigration law scholar at Harvard and director of Harvard’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical program, said she still expects the order to run into substantial legal challenges.

President Donald Trump’s executive order barring US entry by immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations dominated the global conversation. But it’s just one of several important executive orders the Trump administration has made to change the processes and rights available to undocumented people, including refugees, a new report says. Deborah Anker, a Harvard Law School professor and director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, wants to draw attention to the interior and border enforcement executive orders that have not gotten a lot of publicity. What they amount to, she says, is “massive detention and deportation without the priorities set out by previous administrations.” The president “has called for the construction of detention facilities across the southern border,” given agents license to make arrests on the “mere suspicion” of undocumented status and greatly diminished the possibility for appeal. For her, all of these moves are troubling, but it’s most problematic for refugees.

An article by Maggie Morgan and Deborah Anker. All Maribel had wanted was to work in a beauty salon in her home country of Honduras, maybe one day doing well enough to open a salon of her own...Several years later, sitting almost 4,000 miles away in a legal office, on a gray day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Maribel related her story to her attorney in preparation for her asylum hearing. She is one of many tens of thousands of Central American women and children who have fled to the United States since 2014, seeking safety from the unrelenting gang and gender-related violence roiling their home countries. Our attorneys and law students at the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC) represent Maribel and many clients with similar stories from this region.

As President-elect Donald Trump puts together the administration that will help transform his campaign pledges — including those on immigration — into action, Harvard’s community is coming together around members who might be affected...The Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, based at Harvard Law School, is also planning a series of “know your rights” information sessions in the weeks to come, as well as specific sessions for students who want to fill out their DACA renewal paperwork, according to Deborah Anker, clinical professor of law and director of the program...Anker advised students to understand their personal situation, as they may qualify for different programs and alternate deferrals. One encouraging fact, Anker said, is that there is a strong pro-immigrant community in the area, with legal clinics not just at Harvard, but also at Boston University, Suffolk University, and Boston College. That community has mobilized quickly, she said, and she expects that as the weeks pass and Inauguration Day nears, a lot of resources will become available for those who need them.

UMass Amherst officials, under pressure from students, said on Friday they were committed to making the campus a safe haven for undocumented students, faculty, and staff. But they stopped short of meeting the students’ demand that the school be declared a sanctuary campus...Debbie Anker, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, said that while there has been significant amount of research into the issues that crop up in sanctuary cities, a group of Harvard law students is just starting to tease out the details of what it will mean for schools to become sanctuaries. “This is all so new, ” said Anker. “It’s only been a week since the election but already students are coming together to have these conversations, which is heartening.”

By Deborah Anker, Sabrineh Ardalan '02 and Phil Torrey: Fifteen years later, HIRC continues to represent clients affected by post-9/11 enforcement measures. In addition to winning asylum for hundreds of refugees, HIRC has successfully advocated for the government to release mothers and children from family detention centers in South Texas. Continue Reading »

A deadlocked Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Obama’s executive actions to grant relief from deportation to nearly 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The 4-4 tie in U.S. v. Texas, a challenge by that state and 25 others against Obama’s executive actions, leaves in place an injunction by a lower court that blocked the government from implementing two programs that would protect both children and their parents from deportation. “I’m disappointed,” said Deborah Anker, clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program at Harvard Law School. “What this means is that it puts hundreds of thousands of people at risk of deportation, including parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents.”...Phil Torrey, lecturer on law with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and the supervising attorney for the Harvard Immigration Project, hopes the ruling will help galvanize the movement for immigration reform. “Hopefully it will continue to energize the movement to push for comprehensive reform, especially with elections coming forward,” he said.