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Prominent Arizona conservatives and, some would argue, liberal reformers helped spearhead law and order policies that exploded the U.S. prison population and created a crisis of prison overcrowding. This chapter argues that the scramble for prison beds was a major force behind the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), which Congress pushed as a way to purge noncitizens from jails and prisons in order to free up prison beds. CAP gave primacy to criminal enforcement targets and unleashed an onslaught of measures that restructured immigrant detention and deportation, spawned similar programs like “absconder” initiatives, “fugitive” operations, Security Communities, and immigrant prosecution programs like Operation Streamline—in other words, many of the punitive policies we associate with the criminalization of migration in the United States today. However, punitive policies are not necessarily a “backlash” against rights and protections that reformers fought for for over a century. Rather, they operate within post–civil rights “antidiscrimination” constitutional frameworks in ways that recognize rights for certain “victims,” while aggressively punishing and banishing those branded as criminal.

Implementing the Department of Homeland Security’s criminal enforcement priorities—even in a punitive state like Arizona—has not been automatic. In a border region dependent on cross-border flows of people, goods, and money, implementing new crime-centered enforcement priorities did not generate the widespread consensus expressed in Congress. On the contrary, the federal mandate evoked tensions among border agents, local law enforcement, immigrant advocates, and Mexican officials on the ground. This chapter examines how front-line agents’ relations to other players involved in immigration enforcement shaped the ways in which enforcement priorities took hold, with local actors serving as both protectors and prosecutors.

The concluding chapter reflects on the Department of Justice’s recent criminal justice reforms, and the Department of Homeland Security’s new Priority Enforcement Program, designed to target “felons, not families.” Evaluating border crossers and borderlanders on the basis of criminal history has created a new enforcement terrain and new forms of criminalization that differ from historic practices of illegalization. The concluding chapter reflects on this shifting enforcement arena and the global diffusion of criminal enforcement priorities under the so-called war on terror and considers the implications for migrant advocates and academics concerned with race and democracy.

The criminal alien mandate requires that border agents direct enforcement resources toward high-priority targets, principally those with a criminal record. Rather than processing apprehended undocumented migrants according to explicit “racial” and “national” criteria, agents now distinguish between victims and criminals. Focusing on Border Patrol–migrant interactions, this chapter examines how enforcement priorities rooted in the Criminal Alien Program have transformed apprehension and deportation practices on the border.

This chapter examines the range of remedies and the approach to public and private enforcement of the Commerce Act 1986. Over time, the need for private antitrust suits has become even more pressing as the Commission’s workload has expanded greatly. The “light-handed” regulation experiment proved disastrous, and thus the revival of industry-specific regulation was added to the Commission’s duties. The early years were marked by very lenient penalties because judges were sympathetic to businesses falling afoul of the Act. It took the better part of 20 years for tougher deterrent penalties to be realized. The significantly higher penalties introduced in 2001 were the signal for the courts to belatedly give the Act more “bite,” and so it has proved. This chapter also surveys injunctions, damages, and the ill-fated cease and desist orders. After a protracted gestation, the legislature recently introduced the criminalization of cartel conduct.