Blog of Rights

Michael
Tan

Michael Tan is a Staff Attorney at the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project (IRP).  He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School, where he won the Stephen J. Massey prize for best exemplifying the values of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization.  After law school, Michael clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and worked at IRP as Skadden Fellow and a Liman Public Interest Fellow.  His practice includes litigation and advocacy relating to immigration detention and immigrants' access to education.  Outside the ACLU, Michael co-chairs the ABA Committee on the Rights of Immigrants, and serves as a Steering Committee member of the Detention Watch Network and a board member of the Refugee Reunification Project.  Michael also holds a Masters' Degree in Comparative Literature from New York University.

Aleo’s Story: A Refugee and Single Father Is Locked Up for Five Months Before Winning His Immigration Case

By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU at 4:23pm

Today the ACLU released a new interview with Aleo Seh, a single father who was subjected to five months of mandatory detention before winning his immigration case. Aleo is a longtime green card holder who came to this country as a refugee from the Liberian Civil War when he was 15 years old. In Liberia, Aleo was kidnapped, tortured, and forced to become a child soldier by rebel militias and survived by escaping to a refugee camp in Guinea.

No End in Sight: Immigrants Locked Up for Years Without Hearings

By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU at 8:59am

Today, the ACLU argued in federal court on behalf of Alexander Alli, Elliot Grenade, and a proposed class of immigrants who are being detained in Pennsylvania jails for months, or even years, while their deportation cases are being decided.

The ACLU contends that these individuals are being locked up unlawfully and denied the most basic form of due process: a hearing over whether they need to be detained in the first place. Based on today’s argument, the federal court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania will decide whether Alli and Grenade should receive individual hearings on whether their detention is necessary and whether the class action can go forward.

Longtime Legal Resident Finally Gets His Day in Court

By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU at 5:23pm

Last Friday, the federal district court in Buffalo, New York affirmed a basic constitutional principle: no one should be locked up for prolonged periods of time without a hearing as to whether they should be detained in the first place.

Longtime lawful permanent resident Errol Barrington Scarlett has spent more than five and a half years in immigration detention while fighting his deportation case. Now within 60 days, he will for the first time go before a judge to determine whether his detention is justified

Mentally Disabled Immigrants Deserve Due Process

By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU at 5:29pm

Nina Bernstein’s article in today’s New York Times, “Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo,” exposes a particularly chilling feature of our immigration system: the lack of protections for mentally disabled individuals whom the government is seeking to deport from the United States.

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