"The 'crimmigration' merger has taken place on three fronts: (1) the substance of immigration law and criminal law increasingly overlaps, (2) immigration enforcement has come to resemble criminal law enforcement, and (3) the procedural aspects of prosecuting immigration violations have taken on many of the earmarks of criminal procedure. Some distinctions between immigration and criminal law persist and shed light on the choices our system has made about when and how individuals may be excluded from the community."
Juliet Stumpf, The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power, 56 Am. U.L. Rev. 367, 381 (2006).
"The fact that it is difficult to identify where criminal law ends and immigration law begins suggests that the doctrinal entanglement that is crimmigration law is a longstanding feature of United States jurisprudence. It is not. Instead, it is a recent development born of late twentieth century preoccupations and fanned by early twenty-first century fears."
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Deconstructing Crimmigration, 52 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 197, 200 (2018).