The Final Act: Deportation by ICE Air

Abstract

Immigration enforcement has long served as an indicator of the prevailing visceral fears and loathing toward the Other. The foreign is always suspect. Foreigners in great numbers are especially suspicious. These developments are historically tied to the conventions of colonialism, expanded as a function of foreign policy, and to be sure, ideology. By the mid-2010s, the Global South was characterized as “shithole countries,” populated by people who were terrorists, rapists, murderers, and corrupt drug dealers. These representations have shaped a retributive agenda and served to create a structure with roots in federal policies and branches in localities throughout the country through which to expel noncitizens. Deportation is a legal concept about which much has been written. But it is more complicated. For noncitizens, forced expulsion is a lived experience occurring in time and space—an act against the body, mostly black and brown bodies. In this Article we part ways with the well-established narratives of deportation and the punishment/non-punishment paradigm to conceive of deportation not only as a legal concept, but as a physical act—the final act—that is, the culmination of the immigration enforcement dragnet. The physical removal of persons from the United States requires a complex system comprised of aviation networks and their various components, airports and airplanes, hangars and flight crews, and an array of physical restraints to intimidate, punish, or subdue deportees. We examine this infrastructure to illuminate the circumstances of expulsion and the egregious rights violations often suffered by deportees—violations that are almost always hidden from public view. The Article considers the “legal” trajectories of forced expulsion to demonstrate how hostility toward immigrants has given rise to an ever-expanding deportation apparatus by which growing numbers of immigrants are stripped of legal protections, subjected to a subverted legal processes that result in a heightened risk of wrongful deportation and thus by which immigrants reach the point of the final act of removal. It takes up concerns largely unaddressed in legal scholarship: the detailing of human rights abuses on airplanes and airports—sites that function as the terminal instrumentalities of banishment. It then examines airports and airplanes as sites of resistance in the context of immigration federalism debates. We build on the literature that has called attention to the importance of political geography and immigration devolution policies to underscore the importance of new forms of local activism as a means to assert immigrant rights. The efforts to accelerate the removal of non-citizens from the United States has reconfigured the historic narrative about nation’s relationship to immigration and immigrants. Concerns for the humanity of immigrants requires attention to all facets of the injustices of deportation, including the sites of the final act of removal. This Article demonstrates that this may be accomplished through a variety of political and legal strategies designed to call attention to the ways that deportation violates rights protection that exist at the very local to the very global levels of law. What this article offers is a way of understanding and modeling new forms of resistance at sites previously overlooked-- resistance that must stand in for rights protection until the structures of immigration laws and processes can be humanely reset.