immigration Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

Immigration Detention

Season 2, Episode 5

March 27, 2026 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Hiroshi Motomura

Guests Mekela A. Goehring (Executive Director, Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network) and Laura P. Lunn (Director of Advocacy & Litigation, Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network) join the Unsettled hosts in a conversation about immigration detention in the second Trump administration. The administration has been greatly expanding detention facilities by buying ...

Activism

Against Innocence

Unravelling the myth of the depoliticized child

March 4, 2026 • by Alexandra Magearu

1. In my early twenties, I was captivated by the idea that creative processes can return us to the boundless dreamscapes of our childhood. Only back then, I thought, could we afford to experience the world somatically. Not yet captured by social conventions, our bodies had the potential to become everything. ...

Podcast

Rights in the Era of ICE Raids

Season 2, Episode 4

February 26, 2026 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Hiroshi Motomura

In this episode, guest Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, joins the Unsettled hosts in discussing immigration enforcement in the United States from the perspective of civil liberties, assessing the broader implications of contemporary enforcement practices for constitutional rights and the rule of law.

Podcast

The Ostriches: Part V

“the padded paws in tactical gloves”

February 20, 2026 • by Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART V, FORT SNELLING, MN Our hair is full of the sand of cliché,but the ostrich does not hide her head.When the big cats and jackals dancethrough the dry grass, the ostrich liesflat on the horizon, a plumed moundon the definitive curve of the earth.The brown feathers hide among ...

Podcast

“I’m an Immigration Lawyer. Trump Is Shattering My Clients’ Lives.”

Season 2: Episode 3

January 29, 2026 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Hiroshi Motomura

Please note: This episode begins with a discussion of the events in Minneapolis, but was recorded prior to the January 24, 2026, shooting of Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, MN.

“I’m an Immigration Lawyer. Trump Is Shattering My Clients’ Lives.”

Politics

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

If constitutional constraints are real limits on government power, their violation must sometimes justify the same defensive responses that other rights violations justify

January 22, 2026 • by Michael Gregory

If you saw an armed stranger in body armor forcing his way into your neighbor's home at dawn, dragging a screaming mother away from her children while pointing a rifle at the family, would you have the right to stop him? By any means necessary? Now the forbidden version: What if ...

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

North America

One Battle After Another

With ICE in Minneapolis: An eyewitness account

January 21, 2026 • by Emily Condon

On Tuesday morning, January 13, I was driving home after dropping my 9-year-old son off at school. There were ICE vehicles everywhere, I was surrounded by them on Park Ave. After a block or two of this, I parked and got out of my car. I saw that there were many ...

Podcast

H-1B Visas

Season 2: Episode 2

January 20, 2026 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Hiroshi Motomura and Cristina M Rodríguez

David J. Bier, Director of Immigration Studies and the Selz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy at the Cato Institute, joins Hiroshi Motomura and Cristina M. Rodriguez to discuss the implications of 2025 Executive Order on H-1B visas, what might be motivating that Executive Order, and the ins and outs of ...

Media

Eight Months to Learn Spanish

The 2026 World Cup will be a revelation, proving soccer’s arrival in the United States and inviting more Americans to see themselves as part of a Spanish-speaking Americas

November 25, 2025 • by Sean Jacobs and Ivan Pech Luna

On Sunday, October 26, Spain’s two powerhouse clubs, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, met once again in El Clásico, the name given to any clash between the two. Both teams command massive global followings, including in the United States, and this weekend was no exception. The match, held at the ...

Podcast

The Trump Administration’s War on Venezuelan Migrants

Season 2: Episode 1

October 24, 2025 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Hiroshi Motomura and Cristina M Rodríguez

Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer for The New Yorker, discusses his recent article “Enemies of the State: How the Trump Administration declared war on Venezuelan migrants in the US.” In telling the story of a Venezuelan couple living in Chicago, one of whom was sent to CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador, and one ...

The Trump Administration’s War on Venezuelan Migrants

Europe & Central Asia

Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

The rise of the AfD, “Alternative for Germany,” now the nation’s most popular political party

October 6, 2025 • by Bruno Heidlberger

On May 2, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Germany was “not a democracy, but a tyranny in disguise.” True extremism, he said, lay not in the “popular AfD” but in the “deadly immigration policy of the establishment with open borders, which the AfD rejects.” Rubio's ...

History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

September 16, 2025 • by Catherine Simpson Bueker

Catherine Simpson Bueker explores the legacy of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act and how Vietnamese refugees in America reshaped US society....