Excluding Criminals or Mothers? How Vicarious Experiences Shape Legal Attitudes on Immigration Enforcement

Abstract

Abstract Literature provides insights as to how interior immigration enforcement can foment legal cynicism among those it targets. Yet scholars know little about individuals’ evaluative judgments after a secondhand experience, such as when a relative is apprehended, detained, or deported by immigration enforcement. Drawing on data from 26 interviews with individuals who had a family member apprehended by immigration enforcement, I examine how people evaluate a relative’s immigration case and immigration law more broadly. I argue that a gendered legal attitude formation process occurs as family members make and express their evaluative judgments. Respondents often had limited information about the case, and they turned to available gendered discourses to express their legal attitudes. As a result, with a male relative, individuals invoked criminalization discourses, whereas with a female relative, they invoked motherhood discourses. Thus, family members of males who delegitimized immigration enforcement did so via a limited challenging of criminalization discourses, whereas the family members of females tended to delegitimize immigration enforcement via motherhood discourses. Other family members of males also drew from criminalization discourses to legitimize some aspects of immigration enforcement. I argue that this process of gendered legal attitude formation demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of a men’s criminalization.