From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Molly Kaplan, your host for this episode.

Immigrant communities are often asked to get right with the law.

But is the law right in the first place?

That's what our guest Alina Doss asked in her new

book, No Justice in the Shadows. She taps her experience as the daughter of immigrants and as an

immigration attorney to ask whether immigrants who violate the law should be detained or deported.

Too often, she argues, our immigration system is used as a tool of discrimination and oppression

rather than as a tool of justice, and the consequences are dire. Our current immigration system

is breaking up families, forcing people to face persecution, even death in their home countries,

and it's all based on a false premise of ensuring public safety and national security.

DOS is professor of clinical law and supervising attorney at NYU School of Law. She's also the

co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic. Alina, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

Alina, I wanted to start with your book, No Justice in the Shadows. Part of what you take on

here is really dismantling the distinction between a quote unquote good immigrant and a quote

unquote bad immigrant in our immigration policies and beyond because those categories have

huge consequences for people's lives. And just for an example, a good immigrant might be an

asylum seeker, might be someone who was brought by a parent at a young age. And a quote-unquote

bad immigrant might be someone who's had a brush with the criminal justice system for whatever

reason. And I was wondering if you could start us off with a story, a story of Eli, who you represented, because I think in some

ways you use storytelling as a way to begin to dismantle how we categorize immigrants in our policies.

I know Eli as this incredible man, this grandfather, who takes care of his grandchildren,

...