Immigration Articles of the Day by Pratheepan Gulasekaram

A busy bee, Pratheepan Gulasekaram has two articles worthy of recognition.

Busing & The Sanctuary City by Pratheepan Gulasekaram, Rose Cuison-Villazor, and Rick Su

Abstract
Sanctuary cities demonstrated notable legal resilience during the first Trump administration, withstanding legal and political pressure aimed at dismantling their policies. That resilience, however, was undermined by Texas's busing program in 2022 and 2023 in ways that earlier legal and political attacks could not achieve. As this Article argues, busing succeeded not merely by imposing fiscal and logistical burdens, but by surfacing longstanding internal cleavages and ultimately fracturing the coalition that sustained the sanctuary movement. This Article advances a theoretical framework that understands sanctuary cities not as a uniform policy, but as a coalition-based form of local governance, composed of distinct and sometimes conflicting commitments. Within this framework, we identify three distinct strands within the sanctuary movement-administrative sanctuaries, political sanctuaries, and welcoming cities-each of which pulled sanctuary policies toward dissimilar interests. While the unification of these strands under a single policy umbrella drove the movement's initial rise, the busing crisis did more than merely reveal these dividing lines; it exploited them to devastating effect. Through comparative case studies of New York, Chicago, and Denver, this Article provides empirical evidence of how migrant busing fractured the legal and administrative coalitions underlying sanctuary governance. By theorizing the connections between busing and sanctuary cities offers not only a new theoretical framework but also a warning: without reckoning with its internal divisions, the sanctuary movement may prove far more fragile than its legal victories suggest.

The Borderline Constitution by Pratheepan Gulasekaram, 135 Yale L.J. — (2026)

Abstract

This Feature identifies and theorizes a distinct constitutional regime that federal courts have constructed at, adjacent to, and because of, the nation’s border. Drawing together strands of First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment law, along with habeas doctrine, constitutional torts, tribal sovereignty, and separation-of-powers concerns, this Feature demonstrates how constitutional guarantees systematically recede in the border’s shadow. These deviations from canonical and mainstream constitutional norms authorize intrusive state invasion of privacy and other fundamental rights, abdicate judicial oversight in favor of outsized executive discretion, and entrench racial and religious subordination.