Professor Kanstroom was the founder and is also the current director of the Boston College Immigration and Asylum clinic in which students represent indigent noncitizens and asylum-seekers. Together with his students, he has won many high-profile immigration and asylum cases and has provided counsel for hundreds of clients over more than a decade. He and his students have also written amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court, organized innumerable public presentations in schools, churches, community centers, courts and prisons, and have advised many community groups. He continues to organize the Immigration Spring Break Trips, where students work on immigration law cases during their Spring Break period. More information can be found at the Trip website. Professor Kanstroom’s newest initiative, the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, represents individuals who have been deported from the United States, develops new legal theories in support of such cases, and undertakes multidisciplinary empirical study of the effects of deportation on families and communities.

Professor Kanstroom has published widely in the fields of U.S. immigration law, criminal law, and European citizenship and asylum law. His work has appeared in such venues as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Journal of International Law, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, and the French Gazette du Palais. His most recent book, Deportation Nation, was published by Harvard University Press in 2007.

Professor Kanstroom has long served on the American Bar Association's Immigration Commission and the Advisory Board of the PAIR Project. He was rapporteur for the American Branch of the Refugee Law Section of the International Law Association. He has been a visiting Professor at the University of Paris, the University of Boulogne sur Mer, Northeastern School of Law, American University, King’s College, and Vermont Law School.