Majesty and mercy: undocumented immigration, deferred removal action, and the spectacle of sovereign exceptionalism

Abstract

The article casts a critical gaze at the Obama Administration’s decision – articulated in a series of bureaucratic memos and directives issued June 2010–July 2012 – to exercise prosecutorial discretion in processing 300,000 undocumented immigrants slated for deportation from the US Commentators on the partisan left hailed the Administration’s decision as a pragmatic and humane effort to implement federal immigration laws. Commentators on the partisan right argued that prosecutorial discretion constituted an effective – and illegal – abdication of the president’s mandate to execute the letter of immigration law. This article positions the decision, instead, at the nexus of sovereign exceptionalism and political community-building and argues that deferred action constitutes the highest and most controversial deployment of the “majesty” of territorial state sovereignty: the process of selectively meting out “mercy” to those who approximate the set of expectations bound up in the notion of the “good” American. Petitioners for deferred action status, I argue, function, ideologically, to construct the undocumented petitioner’s liminality as help and reify the sovereign power’s exceptionalism. The discussion, in turn, invites us to revisit Schmittian and Agambenian conceptions of sovereign exceptionalism and rethink the work sovereign prerogative does in the everyday.