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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.