Miller Mayer immigration attorney Steve Yale-Loehr was interviewed by NBC LatinX about migrants being transported from the southern United States to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Click here to watch the six-minute video.
Steve was quoted by Newsweek in “Did DeSantis and Abbott Break Law with Migrant ‘Stunt’? Experts Weigh In.” Steve said the situation of Republican governors transporting migrants to northern cities was unlikely to meet the grounds for a credible human trafficking case under either state or federal laws. “Each law varies, but many laws define human trafficking as recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. As such, I think it is an exaggeration to claim that governors in Republican states are engaging in human trafficking by sending migrants to other states. In most cases that I have heard about, migrants have been happy to accept bus or plane tickets, even if they don’t know where they are going.” Steve argued that while federal law prohibiting illegal transportation of migrants presented theoretically steadier grounds for criminal prosecutions, the chances of even that sticking were vanishingly thin. “That presents a closer case than the human trafficking argument. Still, illegal transportation prosecutions and convictions are very rare. They are mainly aimed at smuggling operations. Thus, I think it is unlikely that Republican governors would be prosecuted under this law. The bottom line is that it is an exaggeration to claim that Republican governors are violating human trafficking laws or violating laws that bar illegal transportation of migrants.” The article can be found here.
Steve was quoted by the New York Daily News in “NYC Asks Feds to Fast-Track Work Papers for Migrants and Busing Crisis.” Steve said that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was “decimated” under former President Donald Trump’s administration. “[The Biden administration is] making huge efforts to adjudicate work permit applications for asylum seekers more quickly. But it is going to take some time to improve the processing times because of the deep hole that the prior administration put them into,” he said. The article can be found here.
Steve was quoted by Yahoo News in “After 10 Years of DACA, Dreamers Still Live in Legal Limbo.” The article discusses a new Biden administration rule designed to fortify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA). The article quotes an op-ed Steve co-authored about the program, published in Slate: “Because the Biden administration chiefly focused on its battle with the courts, the new rule fails to adopt any substantive measures to expand or strengthen the DACA program. Most conspicuously, the government declined to extend the date that a young immigrant must have arrived in the United States to apply for DACA. … [It] effectively set an expiration date for DACA regardless of what the courts decide.” Read the article on Yahoo News’ website here.
Steve was quoted by Boundless in “With DACA Program Frozen in Time, Dreamers Await Court Ruling.” The article quotes an op-ed Steve co-authored about the program, published in Slate: “By keeping the original eligibility date, the administration effectively set an expiration date for DACA regardless of what the courts decide.” Find the Boundless article here.