The Rise of Mass Deportation in the United States
The Handbook of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice, 2018
By the end of fiscal year 2016, the Obama administration had formally removed (i.e., deported) mo... more By the end of fiscal year 2016, the Obama administration had formally removed (i.e., deported) more than 3.4 million noncitizens from the United States—exceeding the 2.2 million deported during G. W. Bush’s term, as well as the nearly 870,000 during the Clinton administration (US Department of Homeland Security, 2016a, 2016b). In fact, the Obama administration deported more noncitizens than any other presidential administration and was “on pace to deport more people than the sum of all 19 presidents who governed the United States from 1892–2000” (Rogers, 2016). As a result, many immigrant rights groups criticized the Obama administration and often referred to the President as the “Deporter‐in‐Chief” (Dickson, 2014, para. 1). Other scholars argue that these criticisms are misguided for several reasons. First, when considered within the broader historical context of total repatriations (i.e., “removals” and “returns”), fewer noncitizens have been repatriated from the country in recent years relative to the 1990s and 2000s (Rosenblum & Meissner, 2014; US Department of Homeland Security, 2016b). Second, many of the policies that led to mass deportation preceded the Obama administration (Golash‐Boza, 2015; Rosenblum & Meissner, 2014), including the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the 1996 Anti‐Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), among others. Finally, the Obama administration exercised prosecutorial discretion, as outlined in the 2011 Morton memos and the 2014 Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which limited the deportation of noncitizens “outside established priority categories” (Rosenblum & Meissner, 2014).
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photos of South Texas detention facilities overflowing with women and
children (Darby, 2014). The headline, “Leaked Photos Reveal Children
Warehoused in Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed,”
demonstrates the role of contestation in shaping border policies. The
photos show dirty cells, full of young children and women, often sleeping on the floor or with standing room only. While the surface message
was apparently humanitarian, the evident agenda was to mobilize fear
about a migrant invasion at the U.S.-Mexico border (henceforth, the
“border”). Although the source of the photos was anonymous, it must
have been taken by someone inside the Border Patrol or Immigration
and Customs Enforcement since photography is not allowed and few
people gain access to processing centers (hence, the term “leaked”).
Reported by Brandon Darby, a controversial FBI informant who infiltrated the 2008 Republican National Convention and sent two protestors there to jail, the article has limited text, but asserts that “thousands
of illegal immigrants have overrun U.S. border security and their processing centers in Texas.” This publicity sparked an important turn to
strengthening border enforcement and provided a nationally significant
political symbol, both at the time and in the 2016 election. Understand ing the full impact of this event and the surrounding maelstrom of
humanitarian and anti-immigrant responses to the increase in Central
American refugee families requires a holistic and multiscalar analysis of
contending actors and how they changed and reproduced that which
we call the “border.”
The facts notwithstanding, President Trump’s fictional tally is important to consider because it conveys an intent to produce at least this many people who — through discourse and policy — can be criminalized and incarcerated or deported as “criminal aliens.” In this article, we critically review the literature on immigrant criminalization and trace the specific laws that first linked and then solidified the association between undocumented immigrants and criminality. To move beyond a legal, abstract context, we also draw on our quantitative and qualitative research to underscore ways immigrants experience criminalization in their family, school, and work lives.
The first half of our analysis is focused on immigrant criminalization from the late 1980s through the Obama administration, with an emphasis on immigration enforcement practices first engineered in the 1990s. Most significant, we argue, are the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The second section of our analysis explores the social impacts of immigrant criminalization, as people’s experiences bring the consequences of immigrant criminalization most clearly into focus.
We approach our analysis of the production of criminality of immigrants through the lens of legal violence (Menjivar and Abrego 2012), a concept designed to understand the immediate and long-term harmful effects that the immigration regime makes possible. Instead of narrowly focusing only on the physical injury of intentional acts to cause harm, this concept broadens the lens to include less visible sources of violence that reside in institutions and structures and without identifiable perpetrators or incidents to be tabulated. This violence comes from structures, laws, institutions, and practices that, similar to acts of physical violence, leave indelible marks on individuals and produce social suffering. In examining the effects of today’s ramped up immigration enforcement, we turn to this concept to capture the violence that this regime produces in the lives of immigrants.
Immigrant criminalization has underpinned US immigration policy over the last several decades. The year 1996, in particular, was a signal year in the process of criminalizing immigrants. Having 20 years to trace the connections, it becomes evident that the policies of 1996 used the term “criminal alien” as a strategic sleight of hand. These laws established the concept of “criminal alienhood” that has slowly but purposefully redefined what it means to be unauthorized in the United States such that criminality and unauthorized status are too often considered synonymous (Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015). Policies that followed in the 2000s, moreover, cast an increasingly wider net which continually re-determined who could be classified as a “criminal alien,” such that the term is now a mostly incoherent grab bag. Simultaneously and in contrast, the practices that produce “criminal aliens” are coherent insofar as they condition immigrant life in the United States in now predictable ways. This solidity allows us to turn in our conclusion to some thoughts about the likely future of US immigration policy and practice under President Trump.
[1] These numbers are based on the assumption that “unauthorized immigrants and lawful noncitizens commit crimes at similar rates” (Rosenblum 2015, 22). However, there is research that provides good support that criminality among the undocumented is lower than for the foreign-born population overall (Rumbaut 2009; Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015).
Our theoretical approach for answering these questions has two thrusts. One is that the social world is constructed through contentious politics, though such contention occurs within a wider structural backdrop. Contestation involves multiple actors coalescing and conflicting to seek social and political outcomes. Such outcomes are contingent, with multiple factors and actors entering into play, and may not be what was sought or predicted, even by “winners.” The other is that borders are not simple facts on the ground, but rather are outcomes of state and societal action that continually are produced, reproduced, or changed. This approach is summarized with a process word, “bordering.” Scholars have recently
explored this concept of bordering processes (such as interior security surveillance, exterior consular visa control) set away from conventional geopolitical boundaries. However, bordering is not only adding such practices to novel sites. The push to move beyond the border through expanding the criteria of how we view journeys does not detract from the necessity of understanding how the specific place that is the border is remade through conflict, a process which has direct ramifications farther away. We contend that the bordering process perspective also applies to formal nation-state borders. The specificities of these traditional borders are not just inherent qualities of geopolitical lines on a map. Long-established power geographies like the U.S.-Mexico border were historically constructed, and can again mutate through processes of struggle and transformation, or have their characteristic power practices reauthorized, rejustified, and resourced. Their social-political arrangements thus require continual reproduction or reworking, shaped by contentious politics within wider social domains.
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