It’s worse than you think.

1. One’s standing on a temporary visa (whether a B-visa as a tourist or an F/J-visa as a student) is always subject to such arbitrary fates by both DHS and DoS personnel. This includes the arbitrary and - more painfully, non-appealable and non-reviewable control a single CBP (part of DHS) officer on whether you get to enter the US each time you attempt to do so. That’s the problem this kid ran into. But it starts even earlier: visas are denied in a similarly non-reviewable and non-appealable way by a single FS (part of DoS) consular officer. A staggering percentage of those [1] are denied in the above-mentioned categories. There’s plenty of folks here on HN that can tell you this has happened to them or to someone they know and could vouch for personally.

[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Im...

2. A US permanent resident (informally known as a green card holder) is subject to the same scrutiny by CBP at each entry as someone on a temporary visa. So you can still get deported on your 100th return to the US after 30 years of living here. But you do have legal recourse to have such a decision of inadmissibility reviewed by an immigration court. Great, you might think. But your chances of winning anything in immigration court are largely determined by who you draw as an ICE (part of DHS) prosecutor and an immigration (judges are under EOIR, part of DoJ) judge. The prosecutor has the (limited) ability to decide to fight such an appeal. (This is how Dreamers, for example, aren’t all being deported: they are low-priority ICE prosecution targets, even now under Trump. DACA, under Obama, was a liberal presidential whim: it was an executive order telling ICE prosecutors to indefinitely postpone Dreamer prosecutions.) And how liberally an immigration judge interprets ruling law is very geographically correlated [2].

[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/depo...

3. The judge isn’t the only arbitrary actor under DoJ. EOIR has no independence from the executive branch, so immigration court judges are subject to a president’s policy whims. Judges’ decisions are reviewed by an appellate body (BIA) but that’s also part of EOIR and thus DoJ. And the AG (head of DoJ) can arbitrarily take any pending immigration decision out of the hands of an immigration judge or BIA panel and then decide it on their own. (Former Trump AG Sessions accelerated the usage of this.) Current Trump AG Barr has recently delegated this power down to the head of EOIR, thus adding yet another individual with the power to make arbitrary decisions [3].

[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.washingtontimes.com/news/20...

4. Both AILA (the association of immigration attorneys) and NAIJ (the judges union) wants to end the arbitrariness and establish a pattern of decision making based on legal jurisprudence and precedent. They want to accomplish this by moving EOIR under the judicial branch instead of the executive. AG Barr’s response has been to attempt to decertify the union [4].

[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/08/12/750656176/trump-administratio...