Major Policies- High School

The overarching acts of Congress, judicial precedents, and executive boundaries that dictate how U.S. immigration policy is handled.

• INA (Immigration and Nationality Act): The foundational, primary text of U.S. immigration law. Enacted by Congress in 1952 and heavily amended in subsequent decades, the INA consolidates almost all federal immigration statutes, legal quotas, and enforcement parameters into a single comprehensive body of law.

• APA (Administrative Procedure Act): A federal statute that dictates how executive branch agencies must propose, draft, and implement new regulations. In immigration, the APA prevents agencies from abruptly altering rules or enforcement strategies without providing proper public notice, comment periods, and reasoned legal justifications.

• Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR): A political term for proposed, large-scale legislative overhauls aimed at reforming the entire U.S. immigration framework simultaneously. Typical CIR proposals attempt to combine heightened border security, revamped high-skilled and agricultural work visa pipelines, and a pathway to legal status for the existing undocumented population into a single omnibus bill.

• Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): A historical federal law that previously barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. Following Supreme Court rulings that struck down DOMA as unconstitutional, the federal government now treats same-sex and opposite-sex marriages completely identically for all family-based immigration petitions.