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Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance

For many years, the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic has represented the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance (CIRA)—a grassroots coalition of immigrant, faith, labor, youth, community, business and ally organizations—in legislative, regulatory, and litigation matters. In recent years, the clinic’s representation has focused on CIRA’s campaign to break the prison-to-deportation pipeline in Connecticut. On behalf of CIRA, students have researched and helped draft immigration-related legislation that has been introduced in the state legislature. Two of these bills—one reducing misdemeanor sentences to 364 days and the other amending Connecticut’s TRUST Act to further limit local involvement in federal immigration enforcement—are pending in the Judiciary Committee (Session Year 2019). At the urging of CIRA and its allies, the Connecticut Sentencing Commission recommended adoption of the misdemeanor reduction bill in both the 2018 and 2019 legislative sessions.

State FOIA Litigation and Judicial Marshal Report

Throughout 2018, CIRA obtained records from Connecticut’s Judicial Branch as a result of a settlement of a state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint filed and litigated by the clinic on behalf of CIRA. After reviewing the records, students in the clinic drafted and published a report highlighting the dangerous extent of immigration enforcement in and around Connecticut’s courthouses.

That report, Courting ICE, can be found here.

The records received through the settlement of CIRA’s FOIA litigation can be found in two parts Part 1 of 2. Part 2 of 2.

Also linked here is CIRA’s original FOIA request and the settlement CIRA reached with the Judicial Branch.

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