The current administration’s strong restrictionist views on Immigration Law and Policy have led to a rapid-fire series of Executive Orders, policy changes and procedural revisions that aim to reduce inbound migration overall and impose limits on the rights and opportunities of migrants in the United States. Among these are the proposal to build a wall on the southern border, a ban on Muslim immigration, the elimination of the DACA program aiding migrants who arrived as children, cutbacks to refugee resettlement, stepped up enforcement, detention and deportations, challenges to family-based immigration, proposals to eliminate birthright citizenship, and more.                                                  This seminar course will attempt to put these changes and proposals in context, both from a standpoint of existing Immigration Law, and the historical development of policy norms. Students will need to learn some basic principles of Immigration Law, but this seminar will not be a comprehensive introduction to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Rather, we will look to background principles to understand the meaning and impacts of current developments. We will also survey the range of reactions, responses and opposition that has arisen from the administration’s initiatives.                                                   The goal of this course is to use current policy developments as a window into the way law, both legislated and case-law driven, interacts with policy objectives to produce desirable as well as unanticipated outcomes. We will also look at how administrative agencies assert power to influence the implementation of law in furtherance of policy goals, and the utilization of executive orders and administrative rulemaking to achieve policy goals, particularly when legislative pathways are not open.