Ilya Somin

'Enforcing the Law' Doesn't Justify Separating Migrant Children from their Parents

by Ilya Somin | Jun 21, 2018 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The Trump administration recently adopted a "zero tolerance" policy under which undocumented immigrants apprehended by federal officials are forcibly separated from their children. In April and May alone, almost 2000 children were torn from their parents and detained separately, often under cruel conditions likely to cause trauma and inflict longterm developmental damage. Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims that separation of families is justified by the need to enforce the law, and even asserts that the administration's policy is supported by the Bible. I will leave the Biblical issues to...

The Constitutional Rights of Noncitizens

by Ilya Somin | May 2, 2017 | Featured Articles, Justice

Immigration restrictionists sometimes claim that noncitizens have no rights under the Constitution, and that the US government is therefore free to deal with them in whatever way it wants. At least as a general rule, this claim is simply false. Noncitizens undeniably have a wide range of rights under the Constitution. Indeed, within the borders of the United States, they have most of the same rights as citizens do, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent bans most state laws discriminating against noncitizens. There is little if any serious controversy among experts over this matter. The...

Ilya Somin is a Professor of Law at George Mason University. He is the author of Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain, and coauthor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case. Somin is widely published in both the scholarly and popular press, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, and also the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and USA Today.

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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

by Gary Vogler

From the Foreword by Lawrence B. Wilkerson: “[T]he debate over whether oil was a principal reason for the 2003 invasion has waxed and waned, with one camp arguing that it absolutely was, while the other argues the precise opposite.” “Mr. Vogler, himself a former...

Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism

by Keith Knight

Imagine the Catholic Church (or any person or group of people) doing what the government does every day: Everyone who doesn’t give the Catholic Church 25% of his annual income every year will be put in jail. If he resists the Jesuit officer, the officer has the right...

Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

FOREWORD BY JAY BHATTACHARYA, MD, PHD Diary of a Psychosis is different from all other books on Covid: it traces the development of the government response as it happened, bit by bit, and subjects it to relentless scrutiny: did any of it do any good? It thereby...

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