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Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States
Abstract
Due process protections are among the most important Constitutional protections in the United States, yet they do not apply to non-citizens facing detention and deportation. Due Process Denied describes the consequences of this lack of due process through the stories of deportees and detainees. People who have lived nearly all of their lives in the United States have been detained and deported for minor crimes, without regard for constitutional limits on disproportionate punishment. The court's insistence that deportation is not punishment does not align with the experiences of deportees. For many, deportation is one of the worst imaginable punishments.
... As reported by Todd Miller and Gabriel Schivone (2015, p. 6), "that mammoth security firm is ever more involved in finding 'civilian applications' for its war technologies," aggressively pushing to bring the battlefield to borderlands around the world, where the notion of national security serves as a prime justification for increased border enforcement, neutralizing laws, while redefining borders and justice systems and generating billions in profit Golash-Boza, 2012a, 2012bWelch, 2002Welch, , 2007 The notion of national security, however, tends to bypass the human element-violations of international law and human rights-along with ethnic/racial profiling and police brutality by immigration agents, state police, and local law enforcement Golash-Boza, 2012a, 2012bUrbina & Álvarez, 2015Urbina & Álvarez, , 2017Welch, 2006Welch, , 2007Welch, , 2009Whitehead, 2013). Of course, as the saying goes, blood is thicker than water and money is thicker than both. ...
... As reported by Todd Miller and Gabriel Schivone (2015, p. 6), "that mammoth security firm is ever more involved in finding 'civilian applications' for its war technologies," aggressively pushing to bring the battlefield to borderlands around the world, where the notion of national security serves as a prime justification for increased border enforcement, neutralizing laws, while redefining borders and justice systems and generating billions in profit Golash-Boza, 2012a, 2012bWelch, 2002Welch, , 2007 The notion of national security, however, tends to bypass the human element-violations of international law and human rights-along with ethnic/racial profiling and police brutality by immigration agents, state police, and local law enforcement Golash-Boza, 2012a, 2012bUrbina & Álvarez, 2015Urbina & Álvarez, , 2017Welch, 2006Welch, , 2007Welch, , 2009Whitehead, 2013). Of course, as the saying goes, blood is thicker than water and money is thicker than both. ...
... Since militarized immigration officials are free to patrol in the border zone and far into the country's interior with the "right" to violate the Fourth Amendment, immigration agents use the 100-mi zone to enter private property, search vehicles and private possessions, and randomly or arbitrarily stop people without a warrant or probable cause Golash-Boza, 2012a, 2012bMcDowell & Wonders, 2010;Michalowski, 2007;Romero, 2006;Stephen, 2004). In 2009, for example, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy was forced out of his vehicle 125 mi from the New York State's border, and in 2012, former Arizona Governor Raul Castro, who was 96 years old at the time, was detained by CBP agents, who forced him out of his vehicle and stand in a 90°heat for about half an hour because the immigration agents detected radiation from his pacemaker. ...
As no other time in U.S. history, policing involves a wide variety of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, with a unified mission of patrolling the 2,000‐mile U.S.‐Mexico border in the name of national security. As a culturally and socially diverse geographic setting, the U.S.‐Mexico border has intertwined notions of ethnicity, race, and skin color with citizenship, community safety, and national security. Invariably, this geographic, economic, political, and social boundary has the power to shape the experience of not only law enforcement officers, but also border communities. The multiple issues that exist along the U.S.‐Mexico border provide a more nuanced view of the challenges involved in patrolling the border and policing communities, while seeking to respect privacy and honor international treaties and human rights. Subsequently, with pressing shifts in demographics, police tactics, border security, and social control profitability, in the midst of globalization, the central objective of this article is to further delineate, through analysis of existing data, the dynamics of border policing in the twenty‐first century.
... Research suggests that in many ways, the passage of the IRCA was a game changer for immigration enforcement because it changed how we dealt with crime and matters related to punishment (King, Massoglia & Uggen, 2012). With the rise of the prison industrial complex in the late 1970s and 1980s following the wars on crime and drugs by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, the number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses skyrocketed from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997 (Alexander, 2012;Golash-Boza, 2012). During this time, the focus on the eradication of crime and drugs changed the U.S. from a welfare state to a penal welfare state as society embraced incarceration and punitive approaches to punishment. ...
... Keeping with the shift to restrictive policies, President Barack Obama quickly ramped up deportation during his time in office. Research suggests that since 2009 almost two thirds of the nearly 2 million deportations involved people who had minor infractions like traffic violations (Golash-Boza, 2012;McConnell, 2015). Yet alongside this harshness, the administration made attempts to advance humanitarian immigration policies. ...
... More recently, scholars have observed that the Great Recession prompted receiving nations around the world to adopt polices limiting migration while encouraging immigrants to leave in order to protect native born workers (Ybarra, Sanchez & Sanchez, 2016). Other research has noted changes to the immigration bureaucracy and the increases in immigrant apprehension and detention (Golash-Boza, 2015;Menjívar, 2014). In particular, the effects of the recession and the increase in government spending on enforcement have disproportionately affected groups like Latinos and Muslims. ...
Taking an uncompromising stance on immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has been sharply criticized for its policies and racially coded rhetoric of immigrants as criminals or undesirables. Despite this criticism, the administration's policies fall in line with historically widespread, exclusionary, nativist and xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants. Much of the American immigrant story has been a tortuous struggle for equality, integration and civil rights. This essay takes a critical look at the complicated history of immigration policy during the last century, focusing on the social, economic and political forces that helped shape legislation.
... What initially started as "securing the borders" against foreign terrorists, morphed into internal enforcement of immigration laws directed toward Latinos and other growing immigrant groups (Dowling & Inda, 2012;Chacón, 2012). Crimmigration laws and policies were passed at all government levels and have had a negative impact upon immigrants (both documented and undocumented) (Chacón, 2009;Golash-Boza, (2012aHauptman, 2013). According to Padilla et al. (2008) "in 2007 there were more than 1,400 bills filed addressing immigrant policy at the state level" (p. ...
... Related to increased enforcement is the concurrent rise of the "immigration-industrial complex," as billions of dollars have gone towards the detainment and deportation of immigrants. This has created an expanding "industry" of privatized detention for profit that further oppresses and marginalizes immigrant groups Douglas & Saenz, 2013;Golash-Boza, 2012a). Zayas and Bradlee (2014) and Zayas (2015) documented how citizen-children born to undocumented parents have been collateral damage of punitive immigration enforcement policies. ...
... A booming economic industry has been created around the detainment and deportation of immigrants: "The millions of dollars that for-profit prison companies poured into lobbying have paid off in a big way, resulting in an increase in the guaranteed minimum number of detention beds" (Gruberg, 2015). There are over 350 detention centers throughout the United States, and most are run by for-profit, companies (Furman et al., 2012;Golash-Boza, 2012a;Young, 2011). Some have argued that for-profit businesses are driving immigration detention policies (Gruberg, S., 2015). ...
Crimmigration, or the criminalization of immigration that intensified after the attacks of September 11, 2001, has impacted the lives of many immigrants living in the United States. After 9/11 there was an acceleration of the merger of immigration law and criminal law, and its enforcement, at the local, state, and federal levels. These restrictive laws have resulted in the increased incarceration, detainment, and mass deportation of immigrants throughout the United States. This qualitative study focused on the lived experience of Brazilian immigrants living in Connecticut. A critical phenomenological design was used to understand how crimmigration and other factors such as the economy shapes the lived experiences of Brazilian immigrants. Twenty participants were interviewed twice (for a total of 40 interviews). Seven themes emerged from participants’ interviews centered on: immigration experiences (initial and subsequent), trabalho (work), crimmigration, discrimination, emotions, transnational social networks, and racial/ethnic identity. Brazilians are economic migrants coming to the United States in search of a better life. Brazilians’ experiences with work in the United States are a central facet of their “lived experience.” Participants’ work experiences are molded by historical and political events shaping the national debate on immigration. This study also argues that crimmigration in the United States poses one of the most important human rights challenges today. Critical race theory posits that crimmigration is primarily directed at the growing Latino population of the United States. As agents of change committed to social justice on behalf of oppressed and vulnerable populations, social workers are in a unique position to advocate for immigrants affected by crimmigration, to fight for the human rights of immigrant families and their children torn apart by crimmigration, and to be at the forefront of the immigration debate in the United States. .
... This is especially troubling when people are detained, and the burden falls on them, not on the state, to prove they should be released on bond and granted relief (Cade 2015;Chan 2021). These civil proceedings afford none of the basic protections that accompany criminal legal proceedings, depriving migrants of their life, liberty, and/or property (Golash-Boza 2015). This deprivation constitutes two forms of legal banishment: detention and deportation or what immigration procedure calls "removal." ...
... Past efforts to improve IJ quality and performance have fallen short, with immigration lawyers questioning whether the court's overseeing agency-the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)sufficiently addresses these concerns (American Immigration Lawyers Association 2013; Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse 2008). Technology and infrastructure often break down and impede the respondent's already-limited due process protections, delaying a trial's end well beyond the established date (Eagly 2015;ABA 2019). 1 Meanwhile, in the past thirty years, immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation have effectively sped up, leading to new forms of criminalization and banishment that are straining the court's resources (Golash-Boza 2012). ...
Examining what we call “crimmigrating narratives,” we show that US immigration court criminalizes non-citizens, cements forms of social control, and dispenses punishment in a non-punitive legal setting. Building on theories of crimmigration and a sociology of narrative, we code, categorize, and describe third-party observations of detained immigration court hearings conducted in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, from July 2018 to June 2019. We identify and investigate structural factors of three key crimmigrating narratives in the courtroom: one based on threats (stories of the non-citizen’s criminal history and perceived danger to society), a second involving deservingness (stories of the non-citizen’s social ties, hardship, and belonging in the United States), and a third pertaining to their status as “impossible subjects” (stories rendering non-citizens “illegal,” categorically excludable, and contradictory to the law). Findings demonstrate that the courts’ prioritization of these three narratives disconnects detainees from their own socially organized experience and prevents them from fully engaging in the immigration court process. In closing, we discuss the potential implications of crimmigrating narratives for the US immigration legal system and non-citizen status.
... Third, being that first generation are disproportionately questioned about their citizenship status and that among them are undocumented migrants it is important to evaluate policing procedures on what type of identification is accepted and considered given the consequences of arrest that can lead to deportation. This is especially a concern given that most undocumented immigrants are deported for minor offenses including traffic violations (see Golash-Boza 2012). The effects of neighborhood-level factors of poverty and level of Latina/o immigration on being questioned about citizenship status were also accessed. ...
... In sum, our primary data was designed to conduct a multilevel analysis on who law enforcement questions about citizenship along the US México border that allowed for an investigation of individual and neighborhood effects. To date, we have gained important insights on the implications of policing immigration at the individual-level from qualitative and policy analyses that revealed an array of negative consequences including racial profiling and criminalization of Latina/os (Heyman 2010;Longazel 2013;Provine et al. 2016;Provine and Sanchez 2011;Sáenz et al. 2011), removal and deportation (Armenta 2016a;Golash-Boza 2012;Motomura 2011;Provine et al. 2016) and compromising community policing or cooperation with police (Nygun and Gill 2016; Theodore and Habans 2016). At the neighborhood-level there has been less attention given to the policing of immigration. ...
Although racial profiling is widely studied, the related issue of citizenship profiling by law enforcement has received little scholarly attention. In this study we begin to address citizenship profiling, which may be highly salient in light of the increasing policing of immigration in the United States through Secure Communities and other federal, state and local efforts to localize the enforcement of immigration laws. Using a sample of 563 Latina/o adults residing in 46 neighborhoods in El Paso County, Texas, USA, we assess the impacts of a variety of individual and neighborhood characteristics on the likelihood of being questioned about citizenship status by law enforcement. Results using hierarchical generalized linear models (HGLMs) show that, at the individual-level, first-generation Latina/o immigrants and second-Latina/os are more likely to be questioned about citizenship status than third- and later-generation Latina/os. At the neighborhood-level, living in a neighborhood with a mid-level of Latina/o immigrant characteristics increased the probability of being questioned. The implications of these findings for citizenship profiling are discussed.
... Deportation simply means revoking that privilege. Non-U.S. citizens can be deported without due process, and without consideration for their social, cultural, and family ties to the United States because, in U.S. law, deportation is not punishment (Golash-Boza, 2012). Although noncitizens in the United States are given the full spectrum of rights in criminal proceedings, they are denied many of these basic rights in immigration proceedings. ...
... In stark contrast, an LPR can be deported, even for minor infractions of the law. In many deportation cases, an LPR's social, cultural, and economic ties to the United States can be ignored (Golash-Boza, 2012). This has especially been the case since the passage of the 1996 laws (Kanstroom, 2000). ...
The implementation of restrictive immigration laws in 1997 in the United States has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents—denizens who had made the United States their home. Mass deportations of denizens have given renewed importance to territorial belonging and legal citizenship for theories of citizenship, a relatively neglected area of scholarship in this field. This article draws from interviews with 30 deported Jamaicans who were once legal permanent residents of the United States to argue that denizens often feel “like citizens” based on their family and community ties to the United States, yet that their allegiance and sense of belonging is primarily to their family and community—not to the state. In this sense, there is a disconnect between the law—which privileges legal citizenship—and the daily lives of denizens—in which they can experience a profound sense of belonging in their communities.
... The same logic applies to other ethnoracial groups that also disproportionately experience aggressive policing (Buckler, Unnever, and Cullen 2008;Rios 2011). Additionally, some ethnoracial groups may be subjected to distinctive, aggressive policing practices, such as immigration enforcement by local law enforcement (Armenta 2017;Golash-Boza 2012). Indeed, previous research has found that members of other ethnoracial groups experience more discrimination by police and express more fear towards the police than do White Americans (Graham et al. 2020;Pickett et al. 2022Pickett et al. , 2024Weitzer and Tuch 2004a). ...
Objectives
Existing applications of the group position thesis emphasize interracial differences in policing attitudes. However, this theoretical approach struggles to account for attitudinal differences among White Americans and the increasing role of partisanship in structuring public opinion on policing. We propose a theoretical revision, framed-group-position theory, which posits that political framing is a chief influencer of White Americans’ attitudes toward policing and other social institutions. By contrast, non-White Americans’ policing attitudes are likely to be based on a collective understanding of experienced subordination.
Methods
In two studies, corresponding to two separate data sets ( N = 121,000 and N = 1,150), we test whether partisan affiliations differentially influence police reform support across racial identities and if the moderating effect of political beliefs is mediated by racial attitudes.
Results
Our findings suggest that political affiliation is differentially associated with police reform support across racial groups. Relative to White respondents, political affiliation has a weaker association with reform support among Black respondents, and this moderated effect is mediated by racial attitudes. Among other ethnoracial respondents, we found a similar yet less pronounced pattern.
Conclusions
Framed-group-position theory offers a systemic-racism centered framework to understand interracial differences in both levels and variability in policing and other criminal justice attitudes.
... Most studies on the local policing of immigration laws focus on racialization practices in detecting undocumented immigrants that lead to deportations (e.g. Arriaga 2017;Golash-Boza 2012;Obinna 2018;Provine et al. 2016). The literature also documents how police and sheriff departments taking on immigration enforcement duties has led to a series of police abuses such as ethno-racial profiling and hyper-surveillance (e.g. ...
The U.S. has witnessed increases in the local policing of federal immigration law. This practice raises concerns about citizenship profiling, where local law enforcement questions individuals on suspicion of being undocumented and, in turn, its influence on police legitimacy. We examine whether citizenship profiling influences two measures tapping into legitimacy, perceptions of trust in police effectiveness and cooperation with local police, among individuals and in Latina/o-immigrant neighbourhoods. Based on 691 surveys collected in 46 neighbourhoods in a county along the U.S.-Mexico border, multilevel analyses shows that citizenship profiling reduces both trust in policing effectiveness and cooperation with police among individuals. Moreover, while residents in Latina/o-immigrant neighbourhoods reported more cooperation with police, being citizenship profiled and residing in these neighbourhoods significantly reduced cooperation with law enforcement. In conclusion, there is strong evidence that the local policing of immigration compromises police legitimacy, raising concerns about perceptions of procedural justice.
... A paradoxical component of narratives about immigrants is the fact that they tend to be gender neutral in formulation while operating within the parameters of gendered systemic racism. While factually 60% of immigrants are men (Golash-Boza 2012), and there is an increasing feminization of immigrant labor (Parreñas 2000;Chang 2000;Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010;Flores-González, et.al. 2013), news outlets and social media sites use well-rehearsed myths that address immigrants and immigration in more genderless terms. ...
The post-9/11 era in the United States has revealed a specific fear about immigrants as terrorist threats. Although this fear manifests as a generalized one against any immigrant, when we analyze public discourse, we can find rhetorical patterns involving specific groups, with Latinos/as at center. U.S. public discourse typically conjures images of immigrants as terrorists, which are either genderless or male, and it is activated and cultivated in moments of national crisis (most recently, the 2013 Boston marathon bombing attacks). In this paper, we move beyond notions of immigrants as either genderless or male to discuss post-9/11 perceptions of immigrant women as threats to the security and stability of the country. Specifically, we consider notions surrounding the savagely named “anchor babies” or “terror babies” to explain how images of immigrant women have assumed new meanings following the events of September 11, 2001, with special attention given to conceptions of Latina bodies as threatening. These designations, used consistently among the country’s political right, have created discursive sensibilities in relation to (Latina) immigrants. We tease out the ideologies embedded within the rhetoric of conservative pundits and politicians, who have consistently discussed and proselytized against immigrants, and more to the point, painstakingly articulated immigrants as terrorists since 2001. We examine statements made by social critics such as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter, along with comments made by state and federal politicians, to trace a troubling pattern of discourse connecting women immigrants and their babies to destruction and terrorism--transforming immigrant bodies into perceived threats to the security of the United States. We also use Leo Chavez’s concept of "the Latino threat," relating it to Nicholas de Genova’s idea of "a deportation regime," and Kathleen Arnold’s notions about immigrants as threats to unpack and trace these connections.
... Migration controls have also been 'interiorized and localized,' with the rise of mass deportation (Rodriguez, 2008: 381). In 2010, nearly 400,000 people were deported -50% more than the entire decade between 1981and 1990(Golash-Boza, 2012. 1 Central in such efforts is the cross-deputization of state and local police as a 'force multiplier' of nearly 1 million potential gatekeepers (Coleman, 2009). Breaking from doctrines of absolute sovereignty and 'plenary power', sub-federal enforcement has burgeoned. ...
To refine wholesale accounts of transnationalism, scholars have cited the amplification of border enforcement and immigration control. Whilst received analysis emphasizes multiple processes whether border militarization, mass deportation or the cross-deputization of local authorities, other trends remain unexplored. Employing the insights of scholarship on the diffusion and decentralization of policing and crime control, this work interrogates the enlistment of private individuals in official gatekeeping efforts. Drawing on relevant empirical examples - anonymous tip lines, voluntary immigration posses, border vigilantes, local anti-immigrant ordinances and other practices that compel, encourage and include societal participation - it assesses three modalities of citizen involvement: deputization, responsibilization and autonomization. Each displays distinct state-society relations and techniques for mobilizing societal actors and energies. In addition to illuminating the complexities, consequences and contradictions of contemporary immigration control, this article enriches understandings of social exclusion and the redistribution and transposition of government amidst neoliberal restructuring.
... Sadly, this change was applied retroactively and without clear knowledge of the situation of many of these families and individuals, sending thousands of unauthorized and otherwise legal immigrants back to Central America. 39 This group also included many active and former gang members. In addition to the deportation figures discussed before, the demographic effects of deportation on the population of long-term residents in the United States born in NTCA countries is apparent on Table 2, panel III. ...
In spite of a major economic slowdown in 2007-2009 and an increasing escalation of immigration and border enforcement in both the United States and Mexico over the last decade, unauthorized migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA, i.e., El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) has persisted. These trends are puzzling and stand in contrast to those of unauthorized migration from Mexico, which has decreased over the last seven years. To understand these trends, we briefly describe the history of international migration dynamics from the NTCA countries, discussing their main drivers, features, and demographic profile. We explain the role of economic and political contexts of emigration from each NTCA nation, as well as reviewing the immigration policies and the contexts of reception in the United States and Mexico; we then relate this to the socio-demographic profiles of the NTCA population in both countries. The continued history of political turmoil, violence, and uneven and unstable economic development –along with the growth and strengthening of migrant networks– largely explains the continuation of sustained emigration flows from all three NTCA nations despite the rise of unwelcoming contexts of reception and transit in Mexico and the U.S. Among the different recent issues, we discuss the recent rise in the flow of unaccompanied minors, and the respective roles of the sending, transit, and destination countries in driving the continuation of these flows. Finally, in light of this historical and demographic overview, we offer a set of basic policy recommendations for the management of the different migration flows, and the establishment of new data and research needs to better understand their drivers and future trends.
... The effects of removal are both personal and social and they can migrate along with the deportee to the country of origin. Journalistic accounts and academic studies have documented the hardship of removal, the suffering experienced by families who remain behind, and the hardship that the deportees themselves face upon their return (Peutz 2006;Hagan, Eschbach and Rodriguez 2008;Golash-Boza 2012;Hiemstra 2012;Dingeman and Rumbaut 2009;Kanstroom 2012). 7 The perception that removal is punishment for criminal or inappropriate behavior is widespread in home countries. ...
The United States removes from its territory almost 400,000 noncitizens annually—Germany removes about 50,000 people each
year, France 26,000, and Canada 12,000. In this article, we focus on the impact of removal, and we argue that many individuals—often
those who are best integrated in their countries of long-term residence—will suffer significant physical, psychological, economic,
and social harm upon their return. Democratic states have normative reasons for taking the harm of deportation into consideration,
and we also find qualified support for this position in existing refugee and immigration law. In response, we articulate jus noci as a normative principle for harm avoidance in deportation practice. According to jus noci, democratic states must take into consideration the expected harmful effects of territorial removal and refrain from deporting
individuals whose removal is, all other things being equal, likely to impose significant harm.
This paper investigates whether restrictive immigration policy affects earnings among White, African-American, and Latinx US citizens. Incorporating sociological theories of race that point to state surveillance of Black and Latinx bodies as a linchpin of racial inequality, we ask: Do immigration policies that expand the reach of law enforcement spill over to lower or to raise earnings of employed US citizens? If so, are the effects of these policies greater for Latinx and African-American citizens compared to their White counterparts? Are the effects of these policies stronger among Latinx and African-American men—who are more directly targeted by surveillance policing as a function of their gender—than for co-ethnic women? To investigate these questions, we combine two nationally representative longitudinal datasets—the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We find that immigration policies that expand the reach of law enforcement raise wages among native-born Whites. However, we also find that state policies enhancing immigration law enforcement decrease wages among Latinx and African-American citizens compared to Whites. We find no gender/race interactions influencing spillover effects of immigration policy on earnings.
In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.
The criminalization of Black people in Canada, and their relative distrust of systems of criminal justice, are well-established realities. Here, we problematize the monolithic construction of Blackness implied in this statement. Interrogating differences in African-born immigrants' responses on the General Social Survey, we build on existing theories regarding the 1.5 generation of immigrants in order to demonstrate that those Black immigrants who arrived as children, grew up in Canada, and participated in Canadian education, labour markets, and other institutions of socialization, are the most likely to distrust police, systems of criminal justice and Canadian institutions more generally. We theorize that, contrary to prevailing opinions regarding the ways in which distrust in Black communities stems from wariness of law enforcement in home countries, Canadian system avoidance is led by Black people who are from Canada.
The rapid increase in deportations during the last decade has provided multiple avenues to analyze the experiences of deportees immediately after deportation. More than 90% of the deportations to Mexico occur in border cities. Deporting people to the border is problematic since most of these deportees are not familiar with the area and do not have a social support network. On top of that, Mexican border cities are experiencing a growing spiral of violence due to the aftermath effects of the “Mexican drug war.” Within this context, migrant shelters have become one of the few survival resources for deportees. Using an ethnographic approach, in this study, I investigate how violence is not singular but multiple and multilayered by inspecting deportation policies and practices as the junction where migrant shelters interact with cartel forces and state-made violence to support deported migrants. The paper demonstrates how deportation policies produce or perpetuate various forms of violence toward Mexican deportees in already hyper-violent border cities in Tamaulipas. The empirical findings shed light on how violence against migrants is not exclusively about cartel forces. It is a matter of institutional and structural violence coming from US deportation policies and practices that migrant shelters can hardly handle. Therefore, in this paper, I approach violence not exclusively as direct violence that inflicts physical pain but as a complex process that uncovers other more subtle forms of structural and symbolic violence, carrying nonphysical injuries that can be more enduring and traumatic than those caused by physical pain.
Background
The role of immigration policies as political determinants of health among US-born Latinos is significantly understudied. Immigration policies can produce immigration-related stressors that have ‘spill over’ effects on the health behaviors of US-born Latinos. However, less is known about how immigration-related stressors relate to substance misuse among US-born Latinos.
Methods
1,784 US-born Latinos were recruited via web-panels in September 2021 to complete an online questionnaire. Inclusion criteria included: (1) self-identifying as Latino; (2) born in the US; and (3) being 18 years of age or older. Participants were asked 14-items related to immigration-related stressors and past-year substance use behaviors. Dependent variables included past-year: heavy drinking, high intensity drinking, illicit drug use, prescription drug misuse, cannabis use, cocaine use, methamphetamine use, prescription sedative misuse, and prescription opioid misuse. Two separate multivariable logistic regression models were conducted for each outcome to investigate associations between (1) specific immigration-related stressors and substance misuse; and (2) experiencing greater (vs. fewer) number of immigration-related stressors and substance misuse.
Results
On average, US-born Latinos reported experiencing 3 immigration-related stressors. In multivariable analyses, being fearful or worried about being detained for immigration reasons was associated with increased odds of engaging in heavy drinking, high intensity drinking, and illicit drug use. Having ever feared or worried about being potentially deported for immigration reasons and having ever witnessed or experienced an immigration raid was associated with high intensity drinking. Parental detentions and deportations in childhood were independently associated with high intensity drinking, illicit drug use, and prescription drug misuse. Notably, greater number of immigration-related stressor experiences increased the odds of substance misuse.
Conclusion
Punitive immigration and enforcement policies give rise to multiple stressors that may render US-born Latinos vulnerable to misusing substances as a way of coping. Policies and public health interventions aimed at preventing and treating substance misuse should consider how immigration policies impact the behaviors of US-born Latinos.
This paper analyses the spatialities and temporalities of a U.S. migrant detention centre, to demonstrate the entanglement of migrant exclusion with dehumanisation and racialisation. I examine spatial orderings such as isolation, segregation, and regulated mobilities in detention alongside the arbitrary and deadening tempos and rhythms of detention. I find patterns of inclusionary exclusion through which the “consent” of detained people to their own deportation is conditioned by dehumanising spatio-temporalities. These patterns are the product of the highly standardised, regulated, and ordered spatio-temporalities of detention. I ultimately argue that the spatial and temporal ordering of detention, in all of its standardisation, is a racialising project that rationalises exclusion and dehumanisation, placing responsibility for degradation, deportation, and even premature death, upon those in detention.
The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease–2019) pandemic has exposed long-standing inequalities in U.S. health care. Historically, racial and ethnic minorities have been the most likely to suffer from inadequate health care access and insurance coverage. With the spread of COVID-19, these disparities have dramatically increased. Focusing on native and foreign-born racial/ethnic minorities, this article discusses how entrenched health inequities and structural discrimination have led to COVID-19 morbidities and mortalities. Considering that “essential” frontline workers are disproportionately native and foreign-born racial/ethnic minorities, this work evaluates the impact(s) of social exclusion and the lack of support systems for these workers. Using the framework of intersectionality, this work also examines how race and immigrant status affect COVID-19 spread in prisons and immigration detention centers—facilities that often lack effective health and sanitary conditions and where inmates are also likely to be racial/ethnic minorities.
This article examines the effects of the criminalization of immigration control systems on the prevalence of the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in the United States. This research delineates the relationship between increased carcerality and marginalization. The results confirm existing theory that more intense criminalization is associated with greater marginalization and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of the polity. Controlling for demographic and socio-economic variables prove relevant to CSEC, and models exhibit positive correlations between the variables of interest. I argue that the increase in CSEC rates associated with criminalized immigration policy is a manifestation of changes in exploitation due to an increasingly carceral state. In attempting to exercise control over migrant bodies through state violence, policies that increase criminalization lead to more commodification in precarious communities.
Using a gender-sensitive political economy approach, this book analyzes the emergence of new migration patterns between Central Mexico and the East Coast of the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century, and return migration during and after the global economic crisis of 2007.
Based on ethnographic research carried out over a decade, details of the lives of women and men from two rural communities reveal how neoliberal economic restructuring led to the deterioration of livelihoods starting in the 1980s. Similar restructuring processes in the United States opened up opportunities for Mexican workers to labor in US industries that relied heavily on undocumented workers to sustain their profits and grow. When the Great Recession hit, in the context of increasingly restrictive immigration policies, some immigrants were more likely to return to Mexico than others. This longitudinal study demonstrates how the interconnections among class and gender are key to understanding who stayed and who returned to Mexico during and after the global economic crisis. Through these case studies, the authors comment more widely on how neoliberalism has affected the livelihoods and aspirations of the working classes.
This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in migration studies, gender studies/politics, and more broadly to international relations, anthropology, development studies, and human geography.
https://www.routledge.com/Class-Gender-and-Migration-Return-Flows-between-Mexico-and-the-United/Buznego-Lee-Perez/p/book/9781138318946
Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo analyze the discourse around immigration and its allusions to invasion and (in)security informed by the 9/11 construction of “terrorist attacks”—a discourse initiated by President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11, 2001 events. Discussions surrounding “anchor babies,” seen as the offspring of “illegal aliens,” situate women’s bodies (and more specifically, Latina bodies) as a new threat to the security of the country via fertility rates and citizenship status (similar to discussions of the war on terror as “a new kind of war”). To illustrate, the authors use conservative discourse surrounding “anchor/terror babies,” as public figures began to formulate women’s bodies as carriers of terrorist fetuses/babies, thereby offering a different formulation of immigrants and babies in a 9/11 era.
Alison Reed investigates the border- and boundary-crossing performance of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’sTransBorder Immigrant Tool (TBT), an incomplete cell phone program that offers GPS, guidance, and poetry to those attempting to cross into the United States across the Mexico/US border. Reed suggests a provocation-based performance of “queer provisionality,” revealing the aesthetics of oppressive power structures by juxtaposing them to social utopias. Interrogating the national neoliberal project of both US liberalism and US conservatism, Reed’s essay is also a transcription of the performances launched around TBT, the social and political machinery set into motion by Electronic Disturbance Theater’s failed utopian project.
The immigrant detention system in the United States is civil, rather than criminal, and therefore nonpunitive. However, in practice, detained immigrants lacking many basic constitutional protections find themselves in facilities that are often indistinguishable from prisons and jails. In this paper, we explore the crisis of immigrant imprisonment at the affective level, focusing on the painful experiences of immigrant detainees, while also emphasizing its systemic and racialized nature. Specifically, we place a review of a growing body of research that draws connections between immigrant detention and mass imprisonment alongside the findings from numerous reports issued by human rights organizations on the conditions of confinement within immigrant detention facilities. Using a “pains of imprisonment” framework, we highlight four particularly prominent “pains”: containment, exploitation, coercion, and legal violence. We suggest the infliction of such pain, especially when contextualized within a broader history of Latina/o oppression, demonstrates that immigration prisons are in fact punitive, “lawless spaces” where penal oppression is exercised. We conclude with a call for sociologists to become more attentive to this crisis, and to appreciate the similarities between immigration detention and other forms of racialized social control—namely, mass incarceration.
As the numbers of immigrant apprehensions, detentions, and deportations increase, and in context of anti-immigrant sentiment, education scholars must better contend with the way that carcerality affects undocumented student experiences. Carcerality refers to social and political systems that formally and informally promote discipline, punishment, and incarceration. Guided by Critical Race Theory, I examine interview data from 15 undocumented Asian Americans to show that the portrayal of undocumented student exceptionalism that typically characterizes the discourse on their experiences obscures the centrality of carcerality in shaping how young people with undocumented status navigate their lives. The narratives of undocumented Asian Americans represent a shift in undocumented discourse as these students de-emphasized their academic mobility, demonstrated a hyper-awareness of punitive immigration policies, and were traumatized by and practiced nondisclosure in response to deportation threats. However, while these students developed resistance strategies that they believed would both physically and psychologically protect their presence in the US, some reinforced white supremacist perceptions of the illegality of other undocumented immigrants. Undocumented Asian American experiences illuminate the nuanced relationship between the criminalization of undocumented immigrants, race, and education, and how a legacy of carcerality is vital to deciphering the contemporary educational experiences of undocumented students in the US.
Commenting on whether there was evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defense, famously told the press: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.’ These ‘unknown unknowns’ were the threats from Saddam that could not even be imagined or suspected (Žižek 2004).
Contemporary liberal states are eager to combat ‘human trafficking’, which state actors describe as ‘the scourge of modern slavery’ and a violation of human rights. The same states are also depriving migrants of their freedom on an unprecedented scale through immigration detention, forcibly moving them across borders through deportation, and sustaining a flourishing industry in the prevention and control of human movement. This is not a paradox. The ambition to eradicate ‘slavery’, as much as the desire to severely restrict freedom of movement, reflects a concern to preserve and extend state powers, in particular its monopoly on violence and on the control of mobility.
This article reveals how economic resources and legal status (vis-à-vis the U.S.) shape national attachments and citizenship practices in the context of the U.S.–Mexico border. Through the comparison of middle- and working-class Mexicans, this article highlights how middle-class Mexicans with tourist visas to travel to the U.S. develop what I call transborder citizenship, while deported working-class migrants – legally banned from returning to the U.S. – engage in what I call transnational citizenship. For middle-class Mexicans, transborder citizenship is exhibited through their frequent cross-border experiences and cross-border citizenship practices; however, they remain rooted locally in Mexico. In contrast, for working-class return migrants, transnational citizenship is defined by their restricted mobility even while they retain personal, social, and economic ties with the U.S. Ultimately, return migrants feel dislocated and uprooted in Mexico. The article uses data from observations and in-depth interviews with Mexican nationals living in the border town of Mexicali, Mexico, conducted from June 2009 to August 2010.
For the last 20 years, migration scholars have generated a number of important empirical insights about the ways in which the state, through the enactment of immigration policies, creates workplace vulnerabilities such as discrimination, harassment, wage theft, workplace raids, and the threat of deportation. Recent studies of illegality also examine the role of the state but do so in a way that explores what legal status means and how it is experienced in everyday lives of migrants marked as “illegal” by the state. This article reviews recent research that shows that the state operates in a gray zone of enforcement that puts migrants in ambiguous social spaces and heightens their vulnerability at work. However, research also finds that migrants find ways to exert their agency in challenging work environments.
By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with two grassroots groups that operate near the Arizona-Mexico border, this article illuminates how nativism is translated into day-to-day activism, often in ways that, while openly critical of the state, actually serve to strengthen the state. In contrast to conventional accounts that characterize nativist groups on the border as ‘vigilante’, I argue that the two groups which are the focus of this study, the Soldiers and the Engineers, seek to collaborate with state actors in an effort to restore the state’s exercise of what these groups consider to be legitimate violence in the borderlands. That is, the two groups enact nativism through popular sovereignty. Believing that the state’s ‘absence’ on the border is the result of an understaffed Border Patrol, the Soldiers fashion themselves into a civilian extension of the agency, taking pride in collaborating with locally stationed agents. Meanwhile, the Engineers find their entry point to the state through the ‘border security industrial complex’, hoping to work as private contractors for the Department of Homeland Security to restructure border surveillance. I conclude that we might expect popular sovereignty in other contexts where the state is perceived to be weak.
For undocumented people who become eligible for a US immigrant visa, the pathway to lawful status bifurcates around one central question: how did you get into the USA? While most visa overstayers can adjust their status within the USA, undocumented border crossers must leave the USA to change their status. When they do, all but a few trigger a 10-year bar—often called ‘el castigo’ in Spanish or ‘the punishment’—on their return. This paper draws on a three-year ethnographic study to explore the process of legalisation for Latinos who entered and lived in the USA unlawfully. I pay particular attention to how ‘grounds of inadmissibility’ and federal criminal prosecutions for unauthorised entry disproportionately penalise working-class Latinos, creating a minefield of racialised obstacles to their lawful status. Together, I argue, racialised criminalisation and higher hurdles to lawful status amount to a one–two punch that makes it extraordinarily difficult for undocumented Latinos to ever change their status, even when they are eligible for an immigrant visa based on their marriage to US citizens.
Background
The militarization of the US–Mexico border region exacerbates the process of “Othering” Latino immigrants – as “illegal aliens.” The internalization of “illegality” can manifest as a sense of “undeservingness” of legal protection in the population and be detrimental on a biopsychological level.
Objective
We explore the impacts of “illegality” among a population of US citizen and permanent resident farmworkers of Mexican descent. We do so through the lens of immigration enforcement-related stress and the ability to file formal complaints of discrimination and mistreatment perpetrated by local immigration enforcement agents, including local police authorized to enforce immigration law.
Methods
Drawing from cross-sectional data gathered through the National Institute of Occupation Safety and Health, “Challenges to Farmworker Health at the US–Mexico Border” study, a community-based participatory research project conducted at the Arizona–Sonora border, we compared Arizona resident farmworkers (N = 349) to Mexico-based farmworkers (N = 140) or Transnational farmworkers who cross the US–Mexico border daily or weekly to work in US agriculture.
Results
Both samples of farmworkers experience significant levels of stress in anticipation of encounters with immigration officials. Fear was cited as the greatest factor preventing individuals from reporting immigration abuses. The groups varied slightly in the relative weight attributed to different types of fear.
Conclusion
The militarization of the border has consequences for individuals who are not the target of immigration enforcement. These spillover effects cause harm to farmworkers in multiple ways. Multi-institutional and community-centered systems for reporting immigration-related victimization is required. Applied participatory research with affected communities can mitigate the public health effects of state-sponsored immigration discrimination and violence among US citizen and permanent residents.
This article argues that the Supreme Court's designation of immigration removal proceedings as civil, rather than criminal, and the body of scholarship critiquing that civil designation both suffer from a common fatal flaw. Both treat immigration removal proceedings as a monolith, a single entity. In fact, packed within the term "immigration removal proceedings" are two distinct entities, "expulsion proceedings" and "exclusion proceedings," which each require independent analysis to ascertain their civil or criminal nature. Expulsion proceedings, as I define them, involve the decision whether to cast out a noncitizen whom the United States has previously invited into the national community as a lawful permanent resident. Exclusion proceedings, in contrast, involve the decision whether to admit a noncitizen into the physical territory of the United States and/or into the American political community. By bifurcating the analysis of immigration removal into independent analyses of expulsion and exclusion proceedings we are able to resolve otherwise contradictory guidance from both doctrine and history. A detailed analysis of the historical treatment of expulsion and exclusion proceedings and application of the modern Supreme Court jurisprudence delineating the civil-criminal divide provide compelling evidence that exclusion proceedings are civil but that expulsion can only be imposed as a criminal punishment. The redesignation of expulsion proceedings as criminal would represent a sea change in the conception of immigration removal proceedings; however, this article will demonstrate that criminal protections can be applied in expulsion proceedings without fundamentally undermining the government's interest in those proceedings.
Courts have traditionally held that deportation is a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding, and that deportation does not constitute punishment. Consequently, the constitutional limits on punishment do not apply to deportation. In this article, the author argues that in light of the recent amendments made by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 ("IIRIRA") and several recent Supreme Court decisions, the doctrine that deportation is not punishment is no longer tenable. In some circumstances, deportation has become punishment and therefore at least some constitutional limits on punishment must apply in the deportation context. In a series of recent cases, including United States v. Halper, 490 U.S. 435 (1989), Austin v. United States, 509 U.S. 602 (1993), Department of Revenue v. Kurth Ranch, 511 U.S. 767 (1994), and United States v. Usery, 518 U.S. 267 (1996), the Supreme Court has recognized that there are "quasi-criminal" civil proceedings, that is, civil proceedings that are punitive in their effect. This can occur in a variety of contexts that have traditionally been recognized as civil, including tax cases, forfeitures, and pre-trial detention. If the civil sanction cannot be justified by its remedial purpose, but can only be explained as also serving retributive or deterrent purposes, then the sanction is deemed to be punitive even though it is "civil". In such cases, the civil sanction is subject to constitutional provisions that limit the government's power to impose punishment. The author argues that deportation should not be treated any differently than other civil sanctions. In particular, because the extremely harsh measures adopted by Congress in IIRIRA cannot be explained or justified by the remedial purposes of the legislation, deportation must be regarded as punishment, at least in some cases. As a result, and contrary to the traditionally accepted doctrine, at least some constitutional provisions that limit punishment, including the Eighth Amendment and the Ex Post Facto Clause, apply to some deportation cases. The author also argues that if deportation is to be a truly remedial measure and not punishment, then immigration laws must be amended to allow for waivers of deportation in appropriate cases, similar to the 212(c) waivers that were previously available before the IIRIRA amendments. Such waivers would in effect allow a court to review a case and prevent the deportation if the deportation cannot be justified by the underlying remedial purposes of the statute. Otherwise, where deportation is not justified by the underlying remedial purposes of the statute, deportation is punishment.
From the Author's Introduction: We live in a time of unusual vigor, efficiency, and strictness in the deportation of long-term permanent resident aliens convicted of crimes. This situation is the result of some fifteen years of relatively sustained attention to this issue, which culminated in two exceptionally harsh laws: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). In many cases, these laws have brought about a rather complete convergence between the criminal justice and deportation systems. Deportation is now often a virtually automatic consequence of criminal conviction. This convergence, and the harshness of these laws - their retroactivity, their use of mandatory detention, the automatic and often disproportionate nature of the deportation sanction, and the lack of statues of limitation - raise two related questions: First, why are we doing this? Second, what could be the consequences of this approach for the constitutional legitimacy of deportation proceedings?
"On September 30, 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (1996 Act), Pub. L. No. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009. After an intense lobbying effort by the business community, most provisions relating to legal immigration were omitted from the final bill. Instead, the 1996 Act focuses on illegal immigration reform and includes some of the toughest measures ever taken against illegal immigration." Aspects considered include border enforcement, penalities against alien smuggling and document fraud, deportation and exclusion proceedings, employer sanctions, welfare provisions, and changes to existing refugee and asylum procedures.