Missing in action: practice, paralegality, and the nature of immigration enforcement

Valdez, Inés; Coleman, Mat; Akbar, Amna A.

doi:10.1080/13621025.2016.1277980

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Additionally, I frame my research within a transnational feminist framework. This analytical lens helps focus on state power and practices at the border conceptualizing state power as an amorphous entity rather than a stable one, where on-the-ground practices do not necessarily follow a top-down hierarchy (Valdez et al, 2017). A feminist transnational framework is a helpful tool to analyze practices-the material-and contextualize how Indigenous women as individuals experience processes while acknowledging that identities are embedded in power relations (Briggs et al, 2008;Grewal & Kaplan, 2001, 663).…”

Section: Methods and Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Riva

2021

Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies

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In the United States, Central American Indigenous women who seek asylum are officially classified as Latinas or Hispanic. The erasure and consequent invisibility of Indigenous identity not only causes assimilation but also jeopardizes Central American Indigenous women's procedural rights. Using a transnational feminist lens combined with a Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework, and drawing on fieldwork research, I address the complex relationships of migrants whose identities are intertwined with geography, different states, and racial representations, while I claim that the invisibility of Indigenous women from Abya Yala who cross borders responds to the white settler colonial project.In answering the question "When is an Indian not an Indian?" María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2017) claims "in the United States an Indian is not an Indian when s/he is also African American or Latinx" (139). Indigenous women from Abya Yala 1 who cross the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum are officially non-existent-if they are classified 2 at all, they are considered "Hispanic" or "Latina". This paper analyzes the ways in which official regulations and on-the-ground practices enacted on Indigenous women from Abya Yala at the border contribute to their invisibilization. Practices of invisibilization of Indigenous Peoples take place all around the world. The fact that global disaggregated data on how these populations are affected by conflict and displacement does not exist, or how these are left out of global discussions on humanitarian crisis attests to those invisibility practices (Minority Rights Group International, 2017, 12). In addition to the effects of poverty, gang violence, corruption and insecurity, Indigenous communities are made more vulnerable to issues such as climate change, lack of land rights, and resource extraction projects. For these reasons, these populations feature in disproportionally high numbers among refugees and internally displaced persons (Minority Rights Group International, 2017, 11). Indigenous Peoples threaten the stability of the nation-state by disrupting and questioning its legitimacy, borders, laws, language, and so on. In particular, in the United States, Indigenous Peoples sabotage the myth of its construction as a nation-state was based on an empty land, or a "nation of immigrants". It was through genocide, land dispossession, disease and enslavement that the U.S. became the nation that currently is (Rifkin, 2014). Today, international and national treaties, agreements, and conventions, protect Indigenous Peoples all over the world from the violence inflicted in them in the past. However, their invisibilization has not been left in the past, as Patrick Wolfe ( 2006) rightly points out white settler colonialism is "a structure not an event". Indigenous Peoples today continue to endure violence and exclusion worldwide and are more likely to be displaced by free-trade agreements, the environmental crisis, neocolonial

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Section: Methods and Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Riva

2021

Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies

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“…Written into IIRIRA, the 287(g) program emerged as a legally straightforward way to deputize state and local authorities to enforce immigration law (Valdez, Coleman, and Akbar 2017). Although initially very few localities expressed interest in 287(g), later the practice took shape in the form of "street" and "jail" programs; the former gives police the power to ask about immigration status during routine policing, whereas the latter's check for status was incorporated into the jail intake process.…”

Section: Criminalization Through Interior Enforcementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Immigrants into Criminals: Legal Processes of Criminalization in the Post-IIRIRA Era

Abrego

Coleman

Martínez

et al. 2017

Journal on Migration and Human Security

Self Cite

121

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Executive SummaryDuring a post-election TV interview that aired mid-November 2016, then President-Elect Donald Trump claimed that there are millions of so-called "criminal aliens" living in the United States: "What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate." This claim is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. A recent report by the Migration Policy Institute suggests that just over 800,000 (or 7 percent) of the 11 million undocumented individuals in the United States have criminal records. 1 Of this population, 300,000 individuals are felony offenders and 390,000 are serious misdemeanor offenders -tallies which exclude more than 93 percent of the resident undocumented population (Rosenblum 2015, 22-24). Moreover, the Congressional Research Service found that 140,000 undocumented migrants -or slightly more than 1 percent of the undocumented population -are currently serving time in 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).

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“…Immigration enforcement is site specific, governed by multiple layers of conflicting state and local policy, federal immigration enforcement programs and priorities, the preferences of voters and local officials, the bureaucratic preferences and priorities of LEA leadership, and immigrant population growth (Coleman, ; Farris & Holman, ; Valdez, Coleman, & Akbar, forthcoming; Varsanyi et al, ; Walker & Leitner, ; Wells, ). The combination of these various factors creates differential openings and opportunities for officers and agencies to participate in immigration control.…”

Section: The Local Immigration Enforcement Opportunity Structure: Undmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policing immigrants or policing immigration? Understanding local law enforcement participation in immigration control

Armenta

Alvarez

2017

Sociology Compass

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As the United States has expanded its immigration control strategies, police participation in immigration enforcement has increased in scope and intensity. Local law enforcement agencies contribute to immigration enforcement in three key ways: through the direct enforcement of immigration law, through cooperation with federal immigration authorities, and through the everyday policing of immigrant communities. These enforcement approaches have consequences for unauthorized immigrants, and for the agencies and officers tasked with providing them police services. This article reviews local law enforcement practices and argues that future research should move away from an exclusive examination of police policies towards immigrants, to consider how the policing of immigrants actually occurs on the ground. Moreover, we argue that as long as discretionary arrests funnel removable immigrants into the deportation system, some immigrant communities will perceive policing as fundamentally unfair and discriminatory.

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Missing in action: practice, paralegality, and the nature of immigration enforcement

Cited by 13 publications

References 70 publications

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Tracing Invisibility as a Colonial Project: Indigenous Women Who Seek Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Making Immigrants into Criminals: Legal Processes of Criminalization in the Post-IIRIRA Era

Policing immigrants or policing immigration? Understanding local law enforcement participation in immigration control

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