On Thin ICE? Domestic Violence Advocacy and Law Enforcement-Immigration Collaborations

Abstract

The public focus on domestic violence has been one of the most successful campaigns of the modern women's movement. This success was achieved in part through the creation of strategic alliances among agencies and organizations responding to partner violence. One of the most contested of these alliances involved partnering with the criminal justice system. While representing an advance in holding police accountable in protecting all citizens (Coker, 2006), this alliance has had problematic consequences, particularly as it has extended state power into the lives of women of color (e.g. Richie, 2005). This problem is exacerbated by new collaborations between law enforcement and A case study methodology was used to evaluate proximity to work with undocumented survivors and the organizations' general orientation to domestic violence work. Transcripts of the focus groups were analyzed using a discursive method centered on identifying how the groups worked through a set of dilemmas presented in the focus groups, which involved a crisis call scenario involving an undocumented woman and an agency practice common to many domestic violence service providers.In the analysis of discursive strategies of the groups, a key finding centered on the groups' use of a decision-tree heuristic to work through dilemmas of practice presented in the two scenarios. This discursive strategy facilitated the process of group decisionmaking at points where the actions required were clear and concrete. However, as more complexity, ambiguity or ambivalence were introduced, the limitations of the decisiontree strategy become more apparent.Findings related to the agency's proximity to undocumented workers suggest that this affinity was less important than was the agency's working relationship to the Criminal Justice System (CJS). Closeness to the CJS was associated with reliance on a discourse that places the police at the center of services for all survivors of domestic violence, regardless of documentation status, and a heightened focus on the risk of lethality to rationalize the risks associated with referrals involving law enforcement-ICE iii iii collaborations. iv iv Acknowledgements