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The concluding chapter expands on core ideas developed in the introductory chapter and integrated into the historical narrative, with an eye to reshaping the agendas of sociolegal scholars who research the politics of legal rights mobilization. One core theme is the need for greater attention to state legal violence. A second, and closely related theme involves the theoretical framework of “racial capitalism” in which the contemporary rule of law is embedded and whose hierarchical structures law works to perpetuate. The most original, provocative, and no doubt controversial aspect of this analysis is the development of ideas regarding the variegated traditions of liberal, repressive, and – especially in the post-World War II – hybrid legal forms that sustain racial capitalist hierarchies. Special attention will be given to racialized subjectivities of low wage workers and institutional practices of legal administration that repress them, including especially criminal justice, “crimmigration,” segregated housing policy, and workplace governance. The chapter concludes with the implications of the critical analysis for legal mobilization, as practical politics and intellectual research agendas, in the contemporary period.

This chapter suggests that it is not easy to answer the question “What Part of ‘Illegal’ Don't You Understand?” Immigration law is increasingly intertwined with criminal law to the point of creating a new “crimmigration” regime. Due process questions come up frequently as the toughest crackdown in decades touches the lives of illegal immigrants, legal permanent residents, and citizens of the United States. Moreover, the law is full of contradiction. Unauthorized children have a right to a free public education under the Supreme Court decision in Plyer v. Doe but cannot take a job legally when they graduate from high school. Mixed-status families live with both the fruits of citizenship and the risk of deportation. This chapter argues the need to calibrate the legal lens while recognizing that the essence of the writer's craft is finding the humanity in the story. That can mean changing the camera angle frequently through story selection that takes readers inside the lives of police officers, and clinic directors, as well as children with a parent who has been deported.

This chapter provides an overview of key findings, highlighting the policies and practices that exacerbate and reduce harm to unaccompanied minors, Dreamers who came to the United States as young children, U.S. citizen children in mixed-status families, and undocumented parents. We suggest ways in which our work informs related literatures on crimmigration, race and mass incarceration, and transnational family formation. We conclude with a series of recommendations for policymakers that we believe, based on our findings, will contribute to sounder immigration policy and practice. Primary among these is comprehensive immigration reform. In its absence, we suggest a number of mechanisms, including prosecutorial discretion and deferred action, that can help balance the competing goals of public safety and family unification within a context of limited resources. Finally, we urge that future immigration policy and practice explicitly consider the best interests of children.

This chapter examines the criminalization of Latin American immigrants and Latina/os in media, policy debates, and law, and in relation to the prison-industrial system. In 1980s films, romanticized Italian American mafia families contrasted media alarm—the continuation of the “immigrant emergency”—over unmarried Latino gangbangers in films and television shows. This was largely accomplished by portraying Latina/o family and gender arrangements as dysfunctional deviations from “family values.” In martial arts films, Asian men were cast as exotic and often family-less crime fighters, again occupying a place between Latin American immigrants and Latinas/os and white ethnics. Focusing on increased border control and punitive immigration law that targeted undocumented immigrants and functioned increasingly like criminal law, as well as on racialized tropes of immigrant criminals in media, this chapter asserts that racially disparate discourses of immigrants and crime produced, justified, and negotiated racist and sexist social relations for neoliberalizing America.

The introduction to the volume lays out the general purpose and goals of the book. It answers the query “Why this book?” while also explaining the intersectional framework that guides each section. The first section of this volume examines how the boundaries between “victim” and “offenders” are often blurred on the basis of Latina girls’ and women’s sexualities, legal status, and past histories of drug use and criminal justice involvement. The second section focuses more specifically on Latinas’ experiences once they enter the juvenile justice or criminal justice system as “offenders.” The next section considers how undocumented Latina immigrant girls and women navigate the U.S. “crimmigration” system. The final section highlights the importance of community-based alternatives that are culturally and gender responsive to address the needs of system-impacted Latina girls.

This chapter examines 110 in-depth interviews with Central American and Mexican migrants who were placed in the custody of U.S. immigration enforcement since the rise of mass detention and deportation in the mid-1990s. The authors advance an intersectional approach to understanding the complexity of Latin American women’s experiences as their various identities collide and interact with different sites in immigration custody. Linking border studies and crimmigration scholarship, the authors argue that migrants’ intersectional experiences (along the lines of nationality, class, and gender) necessarily begin prior to entry to the United States. Premigration statuses critically shape both the type and the nature of Latinas’ border crossings as well as their experiences during apprehension, detention, and removal proceedings. Women’s encounters at each of these sites are further influenced by kinship ties, community support, and parental status. Overall the authors craft a transnational conceptualization of intersectionality that crosses international borders, while attending to the dynamic ways gender is constructed and policed under U.S. crimmigration laws.

For many, the punitive turn in immigration stems from the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Although 9/11 linked immigration and national security, this link occurred more in the national imagination than in practice. The day-to-day operations of Border Patrol agents do not involve intercepting terrorists or chemical weapons, nor are border agents apprehending migrants from countries on the “state sponsors of terrorism” or “terrorist safe haven” lists. Despite the rhetorical conflation of immigration with terrorism and national security, what border enforcement looks like in practice is little more than domestic crime control extended to an immigration context. The introductory chapter recounts over a decade of historical and ethnographic research on this new blend of immigration and crime control that began well before the events of September 11.

This chapter draws attention to the interrelated processes of the criminalisation of immigration, as well as the growing imbrication of immigration control with social policy that arise in a world where national sovereignty, citizenship and the corresponding attribution of rights are inextricably linked. It is shown how this not only includes the overtly violent and punitive practices of border policing, detention and deportation, but extends to the exclusion and penalisation of migrants through the operation of the welfare state and what at the surface appear to be ‘liberal’ policies, affecting poor migrants disproportionately. Consideration is also given to how criminalisation of migration is discursively and materially weaponised through ethno-racial othering strategies. Throughout this chapter, it is apparent that the exclusionary processes in operation for those who are deemed to be ‘outsiders’ of our ‘imagined nations’ (Anderson, 1983), are similar to the dividing practices deployed by neoliberal welfare states to determine ‘deservingness’ amongst its citizenry, yet they are experienced much more harshly by those excluded from the citizenry. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a world without borders must be kept on the horizon, if also not immediately achievable.

Local enforcement of federal immigration policy is a new frontier for the use of extensive surveillance and monitoring, key tools of the criminal justice system. These tactics are deployed to target undocumented immigrants with a criminal background, but they impact a much wider set of individuals. Chapter 2 thus demonstrates the widespread impacts of punitive immigration policy on non-criminal, non-immigrant Latinos. Two datasets inform the quantitative analysis. The first is the 2015 Latino National Health and Immigration Survey (LNHIS 2015), and the second is the Pew Hispanic Center 2008 National Survey of Latinos (NSL 2008). Turning the focus to Latinos uncovers the efficiency with which criminal justice policy can be deployed against the nation’s largest minority group, demonstrates the power of familial ties to mobilize, and highlights that the racially targeted nature of the carceral state itself creates a collective fund for political action.

This chapter revisits key findings presented throughout the book. The results indicate a clear pattern of executive influence on the work of U.S. Attorneys (USAs). Additional results suggest that Congress has more influence than previously considered. The models in Chapter 6 show that Booker increased the influence of the President as well as the discretion of federal prosecutors. This naturally leads to questions about how future administrations will attempt to influence USAs and, more directly, how the Trump administration’s focus on narcotics and immigration will alter the priorities of USAs. Beyond this short-term speculation, the final chapter grounds the results in the rich empirical literature on the control of agents, prosecutorial discretion, and the imperial presidency.

This chapter explores the experimentation within British policing resulting from the impetus to identify, fix individual identities, and make people legible in recent decades. Concerns over people’s identification and the crave for information has taken a new shift becoming a prime driver of police innovation and partnership work. The quest to know who is who reinvigorated institutional and operational connections with the inland immigration police, Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement (IE), including Operation Nexus. Operation Nexus (Nexus) is an initiative to bring the operational and intelligence capacities of IE and the police together to identify and manage foreign national suspects. While Nexus has been an important catalyst of fragmented and piecemeal practices in the policing of foreign nationals, the chapter focuses on the bespoke, informal nature of much (migration) policing which relies less on formal structures than in ever fragile and contingent relations, termed as ‘DIY policing’. The peculiar nature of such policing points to the intractable challenges of doing policing in contemporary conditions. At least in the UK, the analysis presented here points to a less coherent strategy and less assertive stance towards migration than that sometimes depicted by policy papers and academic literature on ‘crimmigration’, and provides an important empirical corrective to the dystopian diagnosis of penal power in criminology.

This chapter considers how biased policing practices, combined with institutional cooperation between immigration and criminal law enforcement agents, influences broader trends in deportation. Deportation laws in the United States are race- and gender-blind, but their implementation is not. Ninety-four per cent of interior removals involve men, even though women account for 47 per cent of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. And, 88 per cent of interior removals involve people from just four countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, even though nationals from these countries only make up 66.3 per cent of unauthorized migrants. An analysis of how deportations happen that puts together on-the-ground practices of policing with immigration law enforcement cooperation helps us to understand these gendered and racialized patterns of deportation. This chapter draws from interviews with 117 deportees in the Dominican, Republic, Jamaica, and Guatemala in 2009 and 2010.

The introduction provides an overview of the broad sweep of immigrant incarceration from the late nineteenth century through the present. Although the number of immigrants in detention today based on immigration charges is higher than ever, if we consider all forms of incarceration, including mental asylums and people being imprisoned for drug and alcohol charges, the rates of institutionalization in the mid-twentieth century rival that of the last two decades. Furthermore, even though the Immigration and Naturalization Service policy shifted in the early to mid-1950s to paroling immigrants while they applied for asylum rather than detaining them, this was also the moment when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were being detained for short periods of time and returned to Mexico. In the late 1980s and 1990s, criminal and immigration laws merged to mandate deportation for immigrants who had committed even minor offenses decades earlier.

In the mid-1880s, scores of Chinese migrants were sentenced to six months hard labor at McNeil Island prison off the coast of Washington. After serving their sentences, these Chinese remained in prison when Canada refused to accept them back. The indefinite detention of the Chinese was the first time the government was faced with the contradiction between the still emerging immigration law and the demands of justice. This episode also reveals that the standard narrative that immigration was not criminalized until 1929 is wrong. Further investigation into this prison’s population from 1880 to 1940 uncovered a world of immigrant incarceration, largely based on drug and alcohol offenses. The early history of McNeil Island prison is evidence that the criminalization of immigrants and migration began long before our present era of mass immigrant detention.

In the spring and summer of 1980, 125,000 Cubans fled from the port of Mariel outside of Havana to Florida. By 1987, close to 2,400 Mariel Cubans were being held in prisons in Oakdale, Louisiana, and Atlanta, Georgia, because they had committed crimes in the United States and been ordered deported. Lacking the ability to carry out the deportation, the US government incarcerated the Cubans indefinitely. Upon learning in November 1987 that the Cuban government would accept some of these deportees, detainees in these two prisons rose up, seized 138 hostages, and set the prisons ablaze. After two weeks, the Cuban detainees surrendered once the US government agreed to individually review their asylum claims. The story of the longest prison uprising in US history reveals how law and order politics, emphasizing a heavy-handed policing of crime, merged with immigration restrictions in the 1980s to produce mass immigrant incarceration.

Machado was just five years old in 1990 when she was brought to the United States by her mother, who was desperate to escape the civil war raging in their home country of El Salvador; she wanted a better life for her two young daughters. In 2015, she was picked up in a traffic stop in Arkansas which triggered her deportation based on a felony conviction from a decade earlier. Machado’s story reveals a radical shift that had been happening since the mid-1990s. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants were being caught in a system that penalized people with mandatory deportations for relatively low-level crimes. Machado does not fit easily into the Manichean distinction made by President Obama in 2014 between “felons” on the one hand and “families” on the other. Machado, like so many others, is both.

Although the Supreme Court limited detention for non-citizens in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Zadvydas [2000] and Martinez [2005]), its most recent decisions indicate that under certain circumstances non-citizens can be held indefinitely behind bars with no possibility of even a bond hearing. In practice, non-citizens deemed excludable from the United States are like the forever prisoners of Guantanamo, exposed to massive state power with few constitutional protections. Khalid Qassim is one of the forty Guantanamo detainees held for more than eighteen years to date with no charges and no trial. Although Guantanamo prisoners are not voluntary immigrants, they share with immigrants a lack of protection by the US Constitution and a vulnerability to indefinite detention. Immigrant detention today is part of a carceral landscape in the United States that includes more than 2 million citizens behind bars.