Dr. Jennifer Chacón ~ Bruce Tyson Mitchell Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Topic:
On October 12, 2021, Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memorandum directing the heads of the Department’s immigration agencies—ICE, CBP, and USCIS—to “cease mass worksite operations,” thereby putting an end (at least for now) to a long-standing immigration enforcement technique that relied on mass arrests of workers at job sites. The Mayorkas memo declared such enforcement operations to be insufficiently focused on “exploitative employers,” and inconsistent with the Department’s recently articulated requirement of individualized assessments in enforcement actions. The underlying legal rules that have long facilitated such workplace raids remain in place, however. In a series of cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s, the Supreme Court authorized reliance on race as a factor in the enforcement of immigration laws, authorized workplace interrogations without requiring the articulation of individualized suspicion of the targets of such interrogations, and, in immigration proceedings, allowed for the introduction of evidence seized in workplace raids in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. These rulings remain good law. Drawing on previously published work and ongoing research, this talk explores the origins and consequences of these cases.
Bio:
Jennifer M. Chacón is the Bruce Tyson Mitchell Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Her research focuses on the nexus of immigration law, constitutional law, and criminal law and procedure. She is a co-author (with Susan Bibler Coutin and Stephen Lee) of the recently published Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and The Haunting Failures of Immigration Law (Stanford University Press 2024) which traces the impact of shifting immigration policies on immigrant communities and organizations in Southern California from 2012 through 2022. She is also a co-author on the immigration law textbook Immigration Law and Social Justice, now in its second edition. She has written numerous articles, book chapters, and essays exploring how legal frameworks on immigration and law enforcement shape individual and collective understandings of racial and ethnic identity, citizenship, civic engagement, and social belonging. Her research has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the University of California.
Professor Chacón is a past Chair of the American Association of Law School’s Section on Immigration, and of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Committee. She is a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). She served on the ABF Board of Directors, and serves on the board of the National Immigration Law Center. She has served on the Advisory Board of the ABF’s “Future of Latinos in the U.S.” project, the Advisory Group for the University of Oxford Border Criminologies network, and the Advisory Board of the Latina Lawyers Bar Association.
Professor Chacόn was previously an associate at Davis Polk and Wardwell, and a law clerk for the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth Circuit. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, she held appointments as a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, the UCLA School of Law, and the UC Davis King Hall School of Law, and as a Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean for Administration at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University.
