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In this article, we explore methodological difficulties related to proving racial profiling, specifically in the context of §287(g) and Secure Communities enforcement. How it is that critical immigration researchers understand racial profiling as the object of their research, and how might they go about substantiating racial profiling in the field?...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... roadblock data for the Wake County Sheriff's Office is suggestive. As represented in Figure 1, the Wake County Sheriff's Office staged roadblocks in a northeast to southwest peri-urban gradient south of the city, which is where Latinx residents were predominantly settled at the time the roadblocks were in effect. The reader should note the breaks we have used to code the block groups on the map-multiples of the countywide Latino population at 9.8%. ...
Context 2
... legislative lens on the police resonates with practice-oriented research on the mundane, everyday power of state bureaucracies found mostly in political geography and anthropology (Campbell & Heyman, 2007;Heyman, 2004;Mountz, 2010;Painter, 2006;Proudfoot & McCann, 2008), which stresses the importance of experimentation and discretion and which highlights state power as uneven and contextdependent (e.g., Lipsky, 2010). In general, this literature has problematized the law as a "unity" and, instead, draws attention to "the complicated process of enacting actual laws, policies, justice systems, etc. in relation to stubborn social and regional groups" and how frontline officers "bend the formal law to fit the actual decisions and conditions imposed from above" (Heyman, 1999, p. 15). However, a legislative approach to the police, as we see it, emphasizes more pointedly the ways in which police act unrestrained by the law and, indeed, the ways in which policing is by design resistant to legal codification and definition (Neocleous, 2000). ...
Citations
... This has especially salient consequences for Latinx individuals in the U.S., who are more likely than other groups to be racialized as undocumented (Armenta, 2017;Asad & Clair, 2018;Flores & Schachter, 2018;Jiménez et al., 2021;Menjívar, 2021). Latinx individuals and groups-especially immigrants from Mexico and Central America-can share "noncriminal social characteristics'' (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012, p. 1388 including appearance or language with undocumented groups in ways that make them subject to being profiled in the context of traffic stops or workplace raids (Coleman & Kocher, 2019;Donato & Rodríguez, 2014). In this sense, the U.S. immigration enforcement apparatus serves to socially construct racialized legal status hierarchies in ways that spread the risks and harms of enforcement to immigrants and Latinx individuals, regardless of legal status (Armenta, 2017;Asad & Clair, 2018;Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013;Menjívar & Abrego, 2012;Menjívar, 2021). ...
A wave of restrictive immigration policies implemented over the past several decades dramatically increased immigrant detentions and deportations in the United States (U.S.), with important consequences for a host of immigrant outcomes. Still, questions remain as to how temporal and geographic variation in immigration enforcement within and across the U.S. shaped racialized legal status inequities in health and well-being, particularly among those employed in precarious occupations. To fill this gap, we interrogated the links between changes in county-level immigration enforcement and racialized legal status inequalities in musculoskeletal pain and social welfare benefits utilization among U.S. agricultural workers over nearly two decades (2002–2018). We merged data from three sources [(1) restricted-access, geocoded data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) (n = 37,619); (2) county-level immigration enforcement data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC); and (3) population data from the Census and American Community Survey (ACS)] and estimated linear probability models with year, month, and state fixed effects. We show that, in counties with high enforcement rates, workers—especially undocumented workers—were at increased risk of musculoskeletal pain, including pain that was severe. Heightened enforcement was also associated with declines in needs-based benefits utilization, especially among documented and U.S.-citizen non-White workers and undocumented White and non-White workers. Together, these findings highlight how changes in sociopolitical and legal contexts can shift and maintain racialized legal status hierarchies, with especially important consequences for the well-being of vulnerable workers.
... First, the program had a null effect on the minority-to-White suspect ratio, indicating that it did not reduce racial disparities in terms of intrusive police actions. One possible explanation for this could be attributed to the fact that racial bias is a matter of human intention that is difficult to discern by merely recording officer behavior (Coleman & Kocher, 2019;Garrett, 2000). In other words, video recordings alone may not be sufficient to address officers' implicit biases that are hard to disentangle objectively (Murphy, 2019). ...
Body-worn cameras may produce varying effects on police behavior, depending on the agency-specific accountability context in which the technology adoption is embedded. The cameras may encourage coercive police actions when acquired to incentivize performance, such as by protecting officers from false complaints. By contrast, when acquired to enhance procedural accountability, such as by enabling closer scrutiny of officer misconduct, the cameras may discourage coercive police actions. Based on this framework, this study examined the case of the New Orleans Police Department, an agency that implemented a body-worn camera program to enhance both performance and procedural accountability. Results of Bayesian structural time-series modeling with synthetic control show that the program increased the number of investigatory stops and follow-up measures (i.e., frisk, search, citation, arrest) while decreasing the ratio of more-to-less coercive measures during stops (i.e., arrest/citation-to-warning ratio and search-to-frisk ratio). However, the program had a null effect on the minority-to-White suspect ratio, despite the agency's bias-free policing initiative. The percentage of frisks and searches detecting drugs or weapons also declined. A broader implication of the findings is that technology-based monitoring mechanisms are important, but not a silver bullet for improving the behavior of street-level bureaucrats.
... Geographers have illuminated many additional reasons for the spatially uneven concentration of police power (Boyce 2018;Christensen and Albrecht 2020;Coleman 2016;Coleman and Kocher 2019;Herbert and Brown 2006;Jefferson 2018;Kaufman 2016;Loyd and Bonds 2018; Ram ırez 2020). What's important to emphasise for our purposes is how, as a result, particular places and communities come to bear the cumulative brunt of carceral dispossession in ways that others are almost entirely spared from. ...
This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the “thin blue line” symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.
... Background U.S. immigration law mandates civil, noncriminal detention for certain categories of migrants who come into contact with border and immigration enforcement agencies. Executive branch interpretations of U.S. immigration law have expanded the categories of who can be detained and for how long, who can be deported under expedited removal processing (Martin 2012), who can police immigration and where this takes place (Stuesse and Coleman 2014;Williams 2015;Boyce, Launius, and Aguirre 2019;Coleman and Kocher 2019;Boyce 2020), in what conditions noncitizens will be detained , and whether noncitizens will be charged in federal courts for immigration-related infractions (Varsanyi 2008;Boyce and Launius 2013;Slack 2019). In addition, appropriations bills between 2009 and 2017 set a 34,000-bed daily quota for detention beds, requiring ICE to contract high numbers of beds. ...
... Detention space spans 250 facilities, including shared county facilities, whereby ICE rents beds in local facilities; ICE-run, privately operated facilities; female and family facilities; and ICE-contracted, privately owned and operated facilities. Detention expansion and increasing deportation is highly contested, and geographical research has been critical to charting and challenging these emerging spatialities of state violence (Burridge and Loyd 2007;Mountz 2010Mountz , 2020Nevins 2010;Varsanyi 2010;Conlon and Hiemstra 2017;Coleman and Kocher 2019;Hiemstra 2019;Slack 2019;Paik 2020;Ybarra 2021). ...
... In other cases, researchers have used state documents to challenge state claims to humane treatment and compliance with human rights norms (Boyce 2020). Others analyze official documents to explore how ICE defends authority to detain, legal geographies of immigration, and intergovernmental policing agreements (Varsanyi 2008;Coleman and Kocher 2019;Kocher and Steusse 2021). Others use archival documents to trace genealogies of offshoring, extraterritorial detention, and neorefoulment (Loyd and Mountz 2018). ...
On 14 July 2017, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced that it would shorten the time period for holding eleven kinds of noncitizen detainee records and invited public comment on these changes. NARA stated that the decision to recategorize many of these records as “temporary” was because they held “little or no research value.” The files included records of abuse, assault, and deaths of people in immigration detention. Curious how NARA valued research, we designed a project asking what could be learned—about abuse in detention and NARA—from these documents. This article describes our methodological approach and our findings and discusses the implications of both for future research on immigration, government archiving practices, and accountability. We submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the eleven document types slated for earlier disposal and analyzed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s documentation of neglect and abuse in immigration detention. To do so, we traced the documents’ intertextuality, showing how each document relied on—and further produced—other documents. Challenging NARA’s calculative logics, we show that disposing of these documents would widen gaps, holes, and silences in an already partial, state-centric archive, limiting which future histories of U.S. immigration policies might be told.
... Bringing these insights back to questions of security, we are inspired by critical work that identifies racial differentiation as foundational to policing (Coleman and Kocher, 2019;Elliott-Cooper, 2018;Go, 2020;Kelley, 2016;Nijjar, 2018). Singh (2014Singh ( : 1092 notes that the 'constitution of . . . ...
... 17,18 While the stated goal of the program is to leverage police resources to target undocumented immigrants who had committed crimes, many police departments have used the program to target all potentially undocumented immigrants. [19][20][21] Overall, the proportion of individuals removed from the interior with no criminal conviction or only a traffic-related violation increased between 2003-2015, particularly among women and Latinos. 9 Evidence suggests the 287(g) program acts as a form of structural racism, by creating stress and fear in Hispanic communities through racial profiling and targeting of communities for enforcement activities. ...
... 9 Evidence suggests the 287(g) program acts as a form of structural racism, by creating stress and fear in Hispanic communities through racial profiling and targeting of communities for enforcement activities. 14,[19][20][21] In 2009, a Government Accountability Office report to Congress on the 287(g) program described a lack of oversight, disproportionate number of arrests for traffic-related violations, and dividuals. In an analysis of police driver's license-related arrest narratives before and following the implementation of 287(g) in Davidson County, Tennessee, Donato and Rodriguez found an increase in the use of terms like "foreignness" to describe the reasons for a traffic stop following implementation. ...
... 21 Police departments set up traffic stops in primarily Hispanic neighborhoods, conducted workplace raids, and, in many cases, used the law to harass entire communities. 19,20 Local evidence shows that, following implementation of 287(g) programs, police officers targeted individuals who 'looked like' possible undocumented immigrants -namely, Hispanic in-Enforcement and Very Preterm Birth -Stanhope et al environmental stressor. Local jurisdictions choose to participate in 287(g) and administer much of the program, resulting in variations in where, when, and how adoption of 287(g) programs takes place. ...
Introduction:
Limited existing research suggests that immigration climate and enforcement practices represent a social determinant of health for immigrants, their families, and communities. However, national research on the impact of specific policies is limited. The goal of this article is to estimate the effect of county-level participation in a 287(g) immigration enforcement agreement on very preterm birth (VPTB, <32 weeks' gestation) rates between 2005-2016 among US-born and foreign-born Hispanic women across the United States.
Methods:
We fit spatial Bayesian models to estimate the effect of local participation in a 287(g) program on county VPTB rates, accounting for variation by maternal nativity, county ethnic density, and controlling for individual specific Hispanic background and nativity and county-level confounders.
Results:
While there was no global effect of county participation in a 287(g) program on county VPTB rates, rates were slightly increased in some counties, primarily in the Southeast (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina).
Future directions:
Future research should consider the mechanisms through which immigration policies and enforcement may impact health of both immigrants and wider communities.
... Because this multiplies the reach of immigration enforcement through local police departments around the country, it is not surprising that migrants apprehended by ICE as a result of Secure Communities include those suspected of a variety of nonviolent crimes, such as traffic violations and immigration offenses (TRAC 2020b). Nor is it shocking that its outcomes mirror existing racial and ethnic inequalities in policing (Coleman and Kocher 2019). ...
On March 24, 2020, a 31-year-old Mexican national in Bergen County Jail, New Jersey, became the first federal immigration detainee to test positive for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). By April 10, 2020, New Jersey had more confirmed COVID-19 cases among immigration detainees than any other state in the nation. This article examines the relationship between COVID-19 and processes of migrant detention and deportation through a case study of New Jersey — an early epicenter of the pandemic and part of the broader New York City metro area. Drawing on publicly available reports and in-depth interviews with wardens, immigration lawyers, advocates, and former detainees, we describe the initial COVID-19 response in four detention facilities in New Jersey. Our findings suggest that migrant detention and deportation present distinct challenges that undermine attempts to contain the spread of COVID-19. We provide testimonies from migrant detainees who speak to these challenges in unsettling personal terms. Our interviews highlight the insufficient actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to contain the spread of the pandemic and a troubling lack of due process in immigration court proceedings. Based on these findings, we argue that reducing the number of migrants detained in the United States is needed not only in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic but also as a preventative measure for future health crises. Reductions can be achieved, in part, by reforming federal immigration laws on “mandatory detention.”
... As Coleman and Kocher (2019) argue, 'immigration enforcement now hinges on the scrutiny of "immigrant automobility"', which includes the policing of a whole host of automobility infrastructures and routes throughout both border regions and interior spaces of the United States. They look specifically at automobilebased police-civilian encounters as sites of intensified immigrant policing based on racial profiling and the low bar needed to legally initiate both stops and searches of vehicles based on pretext and reasonable suspicion informed by race, ethnicity, and nationality. ...
The car is a primary locus for police-civilian interaction as measured by routine legal intrusion into the lives of vulnerable populations – communities of color, undocumented immigrants, and those experiencing homelessness in particular. It is the car’s ability to transport bodies as well as its legal liminality as a hybrid public-private space that facilitates such coercive and carceral contact. I therefore argue for the increased inclusion of the car and contact made with its operators and occupants within studies of policing by geographers. In this article, I provide a review of how car space and the automobile have been discussed by social scientists more broadly, followed by a call for geographers to take the lead in centering the car in research looking at everyday policing and routinized state control of people occupying and moving through public space.
... And I could not ask them to reverse the masking by covering the names instead of the grounds for expulsion, as this would have effectively given me access to the complete records. I can only speculate about their motivations for sending me documents that were essentially useless as data, but this particular incident strikes me as a telling example of the problems of access that researchers sometimes encounter when 'studying up' the institution and practices of the police (Coleman & Kocher, 2019;Vrăbiescu & Kalir, 2017). ...
This thesis traces the local government response to the presence of impoverished and street-homeless so-called vulnerable EU-citizens in Malmö (Sweden’s third largest city) between the years 2014-2016, and develops an analysis about how bordering takes place in cities. “Vulnerable EU-citizens” is an established term in the Swedish context, used by the authorities to refer to citizens of other EU Member States who are staying in Sweden without a right of residence and in situations of extreme poverty and marginality. A majority of those whom are categorised as “vulnerable EU-citizens” are Roma from Bulgaria or Romania. Starting from the observation that “vulnerable EU-citizens” have been pervasively problematised as unwanted migrants, the thesis asks how the municipal- and local authorities in Malmö act to discourage and otherwise manage their mobilities by controlling their conditions of stay. In doing so, it seeks to elaborate on theories about intra-EU bordering practices, and to elucidate some of the mechanisms, effects and implications of urban mobility control practices. Methodologically, the thesis is structured as a case study, centring on the case of the intensely contested Sorgenfri-camp – a makeshift squatter settlement that housed a large proportion of Malmö’s estimated total population of “vulnerable EU-citizens”. The Sorgenfri-camp was established in 2014 and lasted for a year and a half before it was demolished in November 2015 on the order of the City of Malmö’s environmental authorities. Often referred to in the media as “Sweden’s largest slum”, the Sorgenfri-camp was quite literally a central locus of a local and national political “crisis” regarding the growth of unauthorised squatter settlements. As a “critical case”, it offers a vantage point from which to trace the development of policy and government practices towards “vulnerable EU-citizens” and observe how the authorities negotiate the legal ambiguities, moral-political dilemmas, and social conflicts that swirl around the unauthorised settlements of “vulnerable EU-citizens”. It also serves as a key example of a more widespread framing of “the problem of vulnerable EU-citizens” as an order, nuisance and sanitation problem. The analysis is carried out with a theoretical framework informed by Foucaultian poststructuralist theory and theories of scale, combining insights from the field of critical border and migration studies with concepts from the legal geographic literature on urban socio-spatial control. In particular, it follows socio-legal scholar Mariana Valverde’s (2010) call to foreground the role of scalar categorisation and politics in the networked policing of various non-citizens. The analysis addresses the construction of the Sorgenfri-camp and its residents as a “nuisance problem” in popular and policy discourse, and explores the effects and consequences of this framing in the context of the administrative-legal process that resulted in the demolition of the settlement. The thesis highlights the city as a space where complex negotiations over residency-status, rights and belonging play out. It submits that local authorities in Malmö have responded to the presence and situation of vulnerable EU-citizens in the city by enacting a series of practices and programs that jointly add up to an indirect policy of exclusionary mobility control, the cumulative effect of which is to eliminate the “geographies of survival” for the group in question. Furthermore, it argues that this reinforces the complex modulations of un/free mobility” in the EU: destitute EU-citizens who are formally free to move and reside within the union are repeatedly moved along, and thus effectively prevented from settling. This is taken to be illustrative of an urbanisation of mobility control practices: a convergence between mobility control and urban socio-spatial control, or a rescaling of mobility control from the edges of the nation-state to the urban scale and, ultimately, to the body of the “vulnerable EU-citizen”.
... Women's ethnicity and place of birth impact their vulnerability to the effects of restrictive immigration policies. The recent wave of restrictive immigration policies has impacted Hispanic communities more than other immigrant communities, due to racial profiling in the application of restrictive policies and increased vulnerability (both perceived and actual) to immigration enforcement (Coleman and Kocher, 2019;Moinester, 2018;Viruell-Fuentes et al., 2012). Additionally, restrictive policies, particularly those that increase chronic stress, likely affect both immigrants and individuals who identify with immigrant groups (due to ancestry or ethnic identity) or who are perceived as members of immigrant groups (Asad and Clair, 2018a). ...
Immigration policy climate may have pervasive effects on the health of immigrants and their families. We examine how living in a state at the time of delivery with a more restrictive immigration policy climate impacts risk of very preterm birth (VPTB) among Hispanic mothers in the United States. We used data from the United States live birth files, 2005-2016. We fit generalized linear mixed models predicting VPTB including information on individual (e.g., age, parity, specific Hispanic origin group) and geographic (e.g., county level poverty, ethnic density) risk determinants. Living in a state with a more restrictive immigration policy climate is associated with a slight increase in odds of VPTB for Hispanic women (aOR: 1.07 (1.04-1.10)).
