Telemundo Quotes Professor Aldana About Immigration Backlog

Professor Raquel Aldana spoke to Noticias Telemundo for a June 2 story on the extraordinary backlog of cases in the U.S. immigration system. The NBC News website republished the story in English.

“The United States (immigration) system was designed in 1965 and has not been reformed since then,” Aldana said. “We talk about asylum and how the system is overwhelmed, but each year we barely grant 20,000 to 25,000 asylum claims to people. ... That is nothing. … Perhaps the problem is not the migratory flow. It is that the law itself does not respond to the reality.”

Raquel E. Aldana joined UC Davis in 2017 to serve as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity with a law faculty appointment. She returned to full-time law teaching in 2020. Aldana’s research has focused on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms and sustainable development in Latin America, as well as immigrant rights. Before UC Davis, Aldana was a professor of law at McGeorge School of Law, and the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She served as associate dean for faculty scholarship at McGeorge from 2013-17. She is a graduate of Arizona State University and Harvard Law School.