Immigration And Naturalization Service Research Articles

Review: The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity, by Jessica Ordaz

Review: <i>The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity</i>, by Jessica Ordaz

"Where's Your Birth Certificate, Pilgrim?": Analyzing Double Age In Immigration Policing and Chicano Community Organizing, 1975-1985

"Where's Your Birth Certificate, Pilgrim?":Analyzing Double Age In Immigration Policing and Chicano Community Organizing, 1975-1985 Erin Mysogland (bio) In the late 1970s, Mexican youth began migrating to the US in growing numbers, expanding the "era of undocumented immigration" beyond a circular movement of adult male workers.1 At this time, the Border Patrol, the enforcement arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), detained and deported migrants at increased rates, particularly in San Diego. Policing in San Diego's Chicano communities also increased as the policies of the "unconditional war on poverty" and "war against crime" criminalized youth of color.2 As the deportation machine coalesced with the carceral state, police denied Chicano and migrant youth the protections of childhood through deportation and detention.3 This article examines two cases of immigration police wrongfully deporting youth—a fourteen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old—to uncover how a "double age" based on race, ethnicity, and citizenship expanded deportability. It also uses the contemporaneous practice of detaining migrant youth at the Metropolitan Correctional Center to show how double age enabled the exclusions of older youth from reforms in detention practices. Using the lens of double age to understand the tension between the age of these detained and deported youth and their treatment by police demonstrates how the selective application of a protected childhood served to expand policing.4 However, immigration police were not the only ones that used the porous boundaries of youth to their advantage in the 1970s and 1980s San Diego-Tijuana borderlands. Herman Baca, leader of the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR), infantilized Chicano and migrant youth to build resistance to policing. Guided by notions of Chicano self-determination, the CCR forged solidarity between Chicanos and undocumented migrants. By evoking a double age [End Page 422] based on notions of child protection, Baca built community-wide support for his demands to end the policing of Chicanos and migrants alike. Ultimately, the utility of double age for both immigration police and community organizers warns that a focus on youth can serve to uphold systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. ________ In the early 1980s, 6 percent of all Mexicans expelled from the US were younger than eighteen, amounting to 20,000 a year from California alone.5 Immigration law permitted the expulsion of undocumented youth through either formal deportation proceedings or the voluntary departure process.6 However, community organizers gathered evidence of the INS also deporting US citizens and migrants with legal status. In examining these illegal deportations of youth, it is important to note that only migrants over eighteen were required to carry their residency card at all times, meaning individuals under eighteen did not have to immediately prove legal status when apprehended.7 Guidance for deportation officers also stated that "[n]o juvenile shall be detained in a Service or non-Service adult facility whether or not he is accompanying a detained adult." Because the INS defined "juvenile" according to the law in the state where they were detaining the individual, in California the INS was not supposed to hold youth under eighteen in adult facilities prior to deportation.8 In defiance of these guidelines, immigration police denied Chicano and migrant youth a protected childhood by deporting them, serving to expand the reach of the deportation machine. In February 1984, Mario Moreno Lopez, a fourteen-year-old legal resident, was talking with friends on the street outside a store in Santa Ana when INS officers apprehended him and thirty-two other individuals they assumed to be undocumented. The INS brought Mario to a detention facility in Los Angeles and held him for a day even though Mario explained that he had residency papers. Mario eventually signed a form agreeing to a voluntary departure because, having witnessed another youth get "shoved to the ground" for not signing the form, he "didn't know it was voluntary."9 The INS deported Mario to Tijuana, where he found himself away from his father for the first time in his life. On his third border crossing attempt Mario entered San Diego, where someone who had seen his picture in the paper recognized him...

La Lucha Obrera No la Para la Frontera (There Are No Borders in the Workers’ Struggle)

The 1970s was a time of growing government repression, incarceration, and subsequent radical activism across the United States and Mexico. This is reflected in the migration, incarceration, and organizing efforts of José Jacques Medina, a Mexican activist who fled to the United States to escape political persecution after his involvement in the 1968 student movement in Mexico City. After the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended and incarcerated Medina inside an immigration detention facility in El Centro, California, activists, inspired by radical movements such as the Black Panther Party and the Third World Left more broadly, organized to gain Medina political asylum and avoid deportation. This story of radical transborder organizing highlights the connections between the carceral state and migration, prison movements and migrant rights. It also exposes the increasing power of the detention and deportation regime in the United States as the INS collaborated with federal agencies such as the FBI to repress political dissent and control migration.

The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants by Adam Goodman

Reviewed by: The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants by Adam Goodman Elliott Young The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants. By Adam Goodman. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Illustrations, notes, index.) Adam Goodman's The Deportation Machine provides a much-needed historical perspective on deportations from the United States. It has become [End Page 230] commonplace for journalists and social scientists to argue that deportations in the last decade have reached unprecedented levels. Goodman reveals the much longer history of immigrant deportations that have peaked and subsided over the past 140 years by exploring the range of ways in which immigrants have been expelled. Formal removals involving a hearing before an immigration judge have been a relatively small subset of the fifty-seven million deportations that have occurred since 1882. More than 90 percent of all deportations have been conducted through an administrative procedure called "voluntary departure," an expulsion that was anything but voluntary. In addition, the government has orchestrated fear campaigns in the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and more recently that used well-publicized raids and anti-immigrant rhetoric as a tactic to provoke immigrants to "self-deport." By looking at deportations holistically, Goodman forces us to change the periodization of immigrant removals and to see recent deportations in a much larger trajectory. The book begins with the origins of federal deportations as a result of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In the landmark case Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893) the Supreme Court established the absolute right of the federal government to "expel or deport foreigners," insisting that detention pursuant to deportation was not a punishment (23). Although the immigration bureaucracy was still in its infancy, and the government did not have the resources to expel the estimated eighty-five thousand Chinese laborers who were in the country without authorization, the legal framework for detention and deportations was created at this moment. By the 1920s, Southern and Eastern Europeans became a major target of deportations as a result of the 1924 Johnson Reed National Origins Quota Act. However, in the succeeding decades Mexicans began to supplant Chinese and Europeans as deportees; by the 1960s, Mexicans accounted for 63 percent of formal removals and 90 percent of all deportations (38). Mexicans have continued to account for the overwhelming proportion of deportations until the present. Beyond tracking the millions of expulsions over time, Goodman examines the human cost of deportations. In addition to the fear instilled throughout immigrant communities, the inhumane crowding on trains, boats, buses, and airplanes used for deportations was designed to deter return-migration. In 1956 deportees mutinied aboard the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)-chartered ship Mercurio after the captain refused their request to disembark in Tampico, Mexico. Some jumped overboard to escape, and a few drowned, highlighting the desperation that migrants felt on the ship. Private shipping and airline companies, like private immigrant detention corporations today, prioritized profits over the well-being of migrants. As Goodman concludes, "Not only was deportation punishment; frequently, punishment became the point" (74). [End Page 231] Although this is a sad and depressing history of families being torn apart and people being locked up and expelled, Goodman also highlights the ways in which immigrant communities resisted. He focuses on the Sbicca workers in suburban Los Angeles who refused to accept "voluntary departure" in 1978 after the INS raided their shoe factory. By refusing to cooperate, the workers drew the INS into a much longer and expensive legal process. The case dragged on until 1992, when the court finally forced the INS to inform future arrestees of their right to counsel. Goodman ends the book by arguing that President Donald Trump represents a continuation rather than a break from a 140-year history of a bipartisan deportation policy. But he also points out that even though the deportation machine has grown into an engorged monster that incarcerates half a million migrants each year and deports hundreds of thousands, the vast majority of the estimated eleven million undocumented people remain in this country. Their ability to remain in spite of U.S. government efforts to remove them is a great American...

Insurgent Visions Of FREEDOM: Migrant Resistance Against The Settler Colonial Nation And Neoliberal Carceral State During The 1995 Esmor Immigration Prison Rebellion

The following paper provides a historical analysis of the 1995 New Jersey Esmor immigration prison rebellion and its aftermath, including two civil class actions, Jama v. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Jama v. Esmor Correctional Services Inc. The Esmor prison rebellion presents a rare example of migrant-led resistance efforts against the neoliberal Carceral State and settler colonial ideologies during the post-Civil Rights Era.

AMA Acts on Treatment of Children at Border, Gun Violence, Pediatric Decision Making

AMA Acts on Treatment of Children at Border, Gun Violence, Pediatric Decision Making

The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US–Mexico Border, 1917–1954, by S. Deborah Kang

In 1900, the US–Mexico border amounted to little more than a scattered line of boundary stones. Through the twentieth century, the US government gradually created fences, walls, detention centres, laws and institutions to define and regulate the border. Still the border retained an uneven, contested and somewhat phantasmagorical quality—and arguably still does. The enormous, beautiful, Mexico-funded wall promised so fervently by Donald Trump has failed to materialise. (The new wall now being built increasingly resembles the wall which already exists; some of Trump’s supporters claim that the wall was only ever a metaphor for something else.) Meanwhile, towns, cities and campuses around the United States plan to resist a federal crackdown on undocumented migrants. Deborah Kang’s tightly focused and deeply researched study of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) tells us a great deal about this complicated history and the contentious present. Kang argues that the INS officials in the US Southwest not only administered federal laws and policies, but helped to make them. To do this she deploys an unfashionable but apt genre—legal and institutional history. Kang has sifted through the internal documentation of INS and uncovered a long and fascinating record of mid-level officials in Arizona, California and Texas exercising ‘administrative discretion’ (p. 1). These men produced their own knowledge of border society, decided how, or whether, they would enforce the law, and created numerous local practices and institutions: temporary border passes, exemptions from literacy tests, mobile task forces to locate and deport migrants, ad hoc legalisation procedures, guest worker programmes and (particularly among the Border Patrol) a tradition of gun-happy abuse of migrants. In the late 1940s, INS officials even determined wage levels for the bracero guest worker programme. This administrative leeway sometimes fostered graft and corruption. It also allowed INS officials to navigate the daunting topography of the border and a welter of competing political forces: agribusiness hungry for cheap and compliant labour, state and county authorities, nativists, distracted or pro-business federal legislators who repeatedly starved the agency of funding, a growing cross-border vice industry, different branches of the Mexican government, Cold War-era liberals who aimed to protect guest worker rights while boosting policing and, last but not least, tens of thousands of ordinary residents who wanted to continue living and working across the border.

Immigration and the War on Crime: Law and Order Politics and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996

The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was a momentous law that recast undocumented immigration as a crime and fused immigration enforcement with crime control (García Hernández 2016; Lind 2016). Among its most controversial provisions, the law expanded the crimes, broadly defined, for which immigrants could be deported and legal permanent residency status revoked. The law instituted fast-track deportations and mandatory detention for immigrants with convictions. It restricted access to relief from deportation. It constrained the review of immigration court decisions and imposed barriers for filing class action lawsuits against the former US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). It provided for the development of biometric technologies to track “criminal aliens” and authorized the former INS to deputize state and local police and sheriff's departments to enforce immigration law (Guttentag 1997a; Migration News 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Taylor 1997). In short, it put into law many of the punitive provisions associated with the criminalization of migration today.Legal scholars have documented the critical role that IIRIRA played in fundamentally transforming immigration enforcement, laying the groundwork for an emerging field of “crimmigration” (Morris 1997; Morawetz 1998, 2000; Kanstroom 2000; Miller 2003; Welch 2003; Stumpf 2006). These studies challenged the law's deportation and mandatory detention provisions, as well as its constraints on judicial review. And they exposed the law's widespread consequences, namely the deportations that ensued and the disproportionate impact of IIRIRA's enforcement measures on immigrants with longstanding ties to the United States (ABA 2004).Less is known about what drove IIRIRA's criminal provisions or how immigration came to be viewed through a lens of criminality in the first place. Scholars have mostly looked within the immigration policy arena for answers, focusing on immigration reform and the “new nativism” that peaked in the early nineties (Perea 1997; Jacobson 2008). Some studies have focused on interest group competition, particularly immigration restrictionists’ prohibitions on welfare benefits, while others have examined constructions of immigrants as a social threat (Chavez 2001; Nevins 2002, 2010; Newton 2008; Tichenor 2009; Bosworth and Kaufman 2011; Zatz and Rodriguez 2015).Surprisingly few studies have stepped outside the immigration policy arena to examine the role of crime politics and the policies of mass incarceration. Of these, scholars suggest that IIRIRA's most punitive provisions stem from a “new penology” in the criminal justice system, characterized by discourses and practices designed to predict dangerousness and to manage risk (Feeley and Simon 1992; Miller 2003; Stumpf 2006; Welch 2012). Yet historical connections between the punitive turn in the criminal justice and immigration systems have yet to be disentangled and laid bare.Certainly, nativist fears about unauthorized migration, national security, and demographic change were important factors shaping IIRIRA's criminal provisions, but this article argues that the crime politics advanced by the Republican Party (or the “Grand Old Party,” GOP) and the Democratic Party also played an undeniable and understudied role. The first part of the analysis examines policies of mass incarceration and the crime politics of the GOP under the Reagan administration. The second half focuses on the crime politics of the Democratic Party that recast undocumented migration as a crime and culminated in passage of IIRIRA under the Clinton administration.IIRIRA's criminal provisions continue to shape debates on the relationship between immigration and crime, the crimes that should provide grounds for expulsion from the United States, and the use of detention in deportation proceedings for those with criminal convictions. This essay considers the ways in which the War on Crime — specifically the failed mass incarceration policies — reshaped the immigration debate. It sheds light on the understudied role that crime politics of the GOP and the Democratic Party played in shaping IIRIRA — specifically its criminal provisions, which linked unauthorized migration with criminality, and fundamentally restructured immigration enforcement and infused it with the resources necessary to track, detain, and deport broad categories of immigrants, not just those with convictions.

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

During 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 prison in the United States (Kandel 2016). The facts, therefore, are closer to what Doris Meissner, former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner, argues: that the number of “criminal aliens” arrested as a percentage of all fugitive immigration cases is “modest” (Meissner et al. 2013, 102–03). The facts notwithstanding, President Trump's fictional tally is important to consider because it conveys an intent to produce at least this many people who — through discourse and policy — can be criminalized and incarcerated or deported as “criminal aliens.” In this article, we critically review the literature on immigrant criminalization and trace the specific laws that first linked and then solidified the association between undocumented immigrants and criminality. To move beyond a legal, abstract context, we also draw on our quantitative and qualitative research to underscore ways immigrants experience criminalization in their family, school, and work lives. The first half of our analysis is focused on immigrant criminalization from the late 1980s through the Obama administration, with an emphasis on immigration enforcement practices first engineered in the 1990s. Most significant, we argue, are the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The second section of our analysis explores the social impacts of immigrant criminalization, as people's experiences bring the consequences of immigrant criminalization most clearly into focus. We approach our analysis of the production of criminality of immigrants through the lens of legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego 2012), a concept designed to understand the immediate and long-term harmful effects that the immigration regime makes possible. Instead of narrowly focusing only on the physical injury of intentional acts to cause harm, this concept broadens the lens to include less visible sources of violence that reside in institutions and structures and without identifiable perpetrators or incidents to be tabulated. This violence comes from structures, laws, institutions, and practices that, similar to acts of physical violence, leave indelible marks on individuals and produce social suffering. In examining the effects of today's ramped up immigration enforcement, we turn to this concept to capture the violence that this regime produces in the lives of immigrants. Immigrant criminalization has underpinned US immigration policy over the last several decades. The year 1996, in particular, was a signal year in the process of criminalizing immigrants. Having 20 years to trace the connections, it becomes evident that the policies of 1996 used the term “criminal alien” as a strategic sleight of hand. These laws established the concept of “criminal alienhood” that has slowly but purposefully redefined what it means to be unauthorized in the United States such that criminality and unauthorized status are too often considered synonymous (Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015). Policies that followed in the 2000s, moreover, cast an increasingly wider net which continually re-determined who could be classified as a “criminal alien,” such that the term is now a mostly incoherent grab bag. Simultaneously and in contrast, the practices that produce “criminal aliens” are coherent insofar as they condition immigrant life in the United States in now predictable ways. This solidity allows us to turn in our conclusion to some thoughts about the likely future of US immigration policy and practice under President Trump.

Weeping in the Playtime of Others: The Obama Administration's Failed Reform of ICE Family Detention Practices

The United States has long struggled with the practice of detaining immigrant families and over time, most reform efforts have flagged, if not failed. This paper examines the impact of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) through an exploration of the evolution of the family residential center (FRC) for families in immigration custody, established prior to the 9/11 terrorist attack by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and expanded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its aftermath. The paper provides an inside look at how policymakers, at various points in the Obama administration, sought to roll back its most infirm practices and the fate of those efforts. It begins with a brief history of family detention in the United States, continues with a summary of the reforms undertaken both early and late in the Obama administration, and examines the significant challenges it faced and the less progressive positions it adopted during its first and second terms in office. The paper concludes with a discussion of reasons for the rapid reversal of its previous reforms and provides recommendations to achieve a civil, civil system of immigration enforcement for families and all others, which means nothing less than the transformation of the immigrant detention system from a criminal to a civil paradigm, consistent with the population and legal authorities.2 The need for such an effort is all the more urgent in light of executive actions taken in the early days of the Trump administration and their initial outcomes. Among those thwarting admissions are orders to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to seal the US borders, shun refugees fleeing from war-torn regions until “extreme vetting” measures are put into place, and reassess others who have already been issued visas. Additional orders issued to ICE expanded and expedited the removal of persons whose conduct could result in charges or convictions as well as those with criminal charges or convictions, resulting in a 38 percent increase in arrests by ICE agents within the first 100 days of the Trump administration (Dickerson 2017b; Duara 2017).

Weeping in the Playtime of Others: The Obama Administration's Failed Reform of ICE Family Detention Practices

The United States has long struggled with the practice of detaining immigrant families and over time, most reform efforts have flagged, if not failed. This paper examines the impact of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) through an exploration of the evolution of the family residential center (FRC) for families in immigration custody, established prior to the 9/11 terrorist attack by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and expanded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its aftermath. The paper provides an inside look at how policymakers, at various points in the Obama administration, sought to roll back its most infirm practices and the fate of those efforts. It begins with a brief history of family detention in the United States, continues with a summary of the reforms undertaken both early and late in the Obama administration, and examines the significant challenges it faced and the less progressive positions it adopted during its first and second terms in office.The paper concludes with a discussion of reasons for the rapid reversal of its previous reforms and provides recommendations to achieve a civil, civil system of immigration enforcement for families and all others, which means nothing less than the transformation of the immigrant detention system from a criminal to a civil paradigm, consistent with the population and legal authorities.[1] The need for such an effort is all the more urgent in light of executive actions taken in the early days of the Trump administration and their initial outcomes. Among those thwarting admissions are orders to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to seal the US borders, shun refugees fleeing from war-torn regions until “extreme vetting” measures are put into place, and reassess others who have already been issued visas. Additional orders issued to ICE expanded and expedited the removal of persons whose conduct could result in charges or convictions as well as those with criminal charges or convictions, resulting in a 38 percent increase in arrests by ICE agents within the first 100 days of the Trump administration (Dickerson 2017b; Duara 2017). [1] For further discussion of the concept of a civil, civil system of immigration enforcement, see Schriro (2009).

The Challenge of Policing Immigrant Communities

Providing effective policing for immigrant communities is one of the greatest challenges facing law enforcement agencies in the United States today. Despite the fact that police departments across the country have worked hard to improve their relations with immigrant communities in recent years, research suggests that many immigrants continue to encounter considerable difficulties in their dealings with the police and the criminal justice system in general. Language barriers, cultural differences, and a lack of familiarity with the US legal system, are all factors that can prevent immigrants from gaining access to justice or taking advantage of important criminal justice services. In addition, recent immigrants often fail to report crimes to the police with the result that many US immigrant communities receive inadequate funding for crime control and law enforcement.Many of the problems currently facing the police stem from a lack of trust on the part of recent immigrants. Many immigrants continue to view the police with a mixture of fear and suspicion, often as a result of negative experiences with the police in their countries of origin, or because they are afraid of being turned over to the immigration authorities.In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, the debate over how best to police immigrant communities has taken a new turn. For many, the concern has turned from community outreach and building trust, toward questions of security and the threat of terrorism. There have been repeated calls for the police to become more involved with border controls and the apprehension of illegal immigrants, and for local law enforcement agencies to work more closely with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and federal law enforcement agencies. Although a few senior police officers have expressed reservations about being drawn into immigration matters, other police departments have quickly offered increased support to the INS.In light of such developments, there is now a pressing need to re-examine how immigrants are treated by the criminal justice system, and to ask whether new approaches to the policing of immigrant communities should be considered. In particular, this paper focuses on the treatment of immigrants by the police, and the challenge of reconciling growing concerns about the problem of illegal immigration and national security with the desire to provide effective legal protection for immigrant victims and their communities.

The Human Costs of Outsourcing Deportation

The Human Costs of Outsourcing Deportation Adam Goodman (bio) In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans have sought asylum in the United States. Most of them are from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the three countries that compose the Northern Triangle, one of the most violent regions in the world. Rather than providing Central Americans humanitarian assistance or a place of refuge, the United States—first under Barack Obama and now under Donald J. Trump—increased its detention capacity and expedited deportations. In fiscal year 2014 alone, U.S. Border Patrol officers apprehended more than 237,000 people from the Northern Triangle, including nearly 52,000 unaccompanied children and over 61,000 people who arrived with their families. They also removed more than 121,000 Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans, 70 percent of whom the government classified as “non-criminals.”1 The following year, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended half as many people from the Northern Triangle, leading some people to declare that the “surge” had ended. In reality, however, the decline in apprehensions was a product of the U.S. government’s outsourcing to Mexico the deportation of Central American asylum seekers. From 2014 to 2015, the number of people Mexico deported to the Northern Triangle shot up from 91,000 to more than 165,000, more than making up for the nearly 40 percent drop in U.S. deportations to the region. When considered together, the number of people the United States and Mexico deported to the Northern Triangle actually increased, from 213,000 to more than 251,000. The difference was whereas the United States accounted for more than half of all deportations in fiscal year 2014, Mexico was responsible for two-thirds of the deportations in 2015.2 Far from a new policy innovation, the United States has pressured and paid Mexico to carry out its dirty work since the early 1980s, when civil wars throughout Central America—funded in large part by billions of dollars of U.S. aid to right-wing governments in El Salvador and Guatemala—left at least a quarter of a million people dead and three million more displaced.3 According to Larry Richardson, the U.S. Border Patrol chief in McAllen, Texas, at the time, “the United States ha[d] quietly been paying Mexicans to deport Central Americans to Guatemala” since 1981. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) also “organized a spy ring in Mexico to assist in intercepting Central Americans headed for the United States” and offered immigration enforcement training to Mexican officials. For at least three years in the early 1990s, the U.S. Congress appropriated $350,000 a year to pay Mexico to deport transit migrants. In 2001, as part of Mexican president Vicente Fox’s “Plan Frontera Sur,” the United States offered its southern neighbor as much as $2 million per year to deport Central Americans to their home countries instead of just across the border [End Page 527] to Guatemala. As a representative of the Roman Catholic Church put it, by the 1990s the border “ha[d] moved south. It [was] no longer between Mexico and the United States but between Guatemala and Mexico.”4 The United States’ outsourcing of deportation to Mexico was part of a larger strategy of preventing all refugees from reaching U.S. soil, effectively denying people their human right to seek asylum. During the early years of the Clinton administration, the United States implemented a policy of interdiction in order to skirt the asylum process by redirecting boats of smuggled migrants to other countries. Then, in 1997, the INS launched Operation Global Reach, an $8.2 million initiative based on “combating illegal immigration through emphasis on overseas deterrence.” Between 1997 and 2001 the INS established forty overseas offices, staffed by 150 U.S. government employees who focused on intelligence gathering, reducing migrant smuggling, and training foreign law enforcement and airline officials to identify fraudulent documents. During the Operation’s first four years, the INS trained more than 45,000 foreign officials around the globe, from West Africa to Western Europe, from East and South Asia to Latin America—and including San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Guatemala City, Mexico City, Ciudad...

Containing Kassindja: detention, gendered threats and border control in the United States

In 1996, the USA issued a landmark decision to grant political asylum to a young woman, Fauziya Kassindja, due to the threat of forced genital circumcision. The case, Matter of Kasinga, is now a cornerstone in the area of law known as ‘gender-based asylum.’ While the legal victory occurred during a watershed moment for women’s human rights, it also spawned considerable critique for reproducing colonial tropes of third-world women, cultural backwardness, and narratives of rescue. This article offers another perspective by examining key phases of the case that predate the final decision. I demonstrate how logics of containment shaped the case trajectory and outcome. Initially, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sought to contain Kassindja as a bogus asylum seeker through detention. However, once a powerful advocacy campaign exposed the violence of detention, the INS shifted their containment strategies to safeguarding the legal paradigm and circumscribing its legacy as a precedent-setting case. By focusing on the role of detention and the logics of containment, this article supplements cultural critiques of the case and provides an example of how gender and gender violence can be leveraged by state agencies and actors to reinforce border control and manage refugee/asylee populations.

Keeping an Eye on the I.N.S.: A Case for Civilian Review of Uncivil Conduct

Use of deadly force by the U.S. Border Patrol (and other immigration officers) and other forms of violence against border-crossing migrants has captured the attention of the agency's leadership, although the response remains equivocal and erratic. In 1993, the then Acting Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) pledged to "aggressively pursue[ ]" claims of misconduct and "strictly adhere" to investigative and disciplinary procedures. However, the INS stopped short of endorsing changes in complaint review procedures, such as the call for civilian oversight. A decade has passed since the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights identified serious problems in the INS procedures and recommended changes in a report to the President and Congress. Problems include delays in investigation, lack of public awareness of the process, no acknowledgment of receipt of complaints, deficiencies in the selection of investigators and investigative procedures and an inadequate statistical record of complaints and disposition. The same problems plague the system today, and almost none of the recommendations have been implemented. In this article, the author first documents examples of misconduct by the Border Patrol and other immigration and customs agents and examines the current INS internal complaint system. Next, he sets out some of the necessary features of a civilian or external review process, many of which are embodied in legislation recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, with an emphasis on those features unique to immigrants or immigration enforcement. (An Appendix contains proposed model regulations for an Immigration Law Enforcement Civilian Review Board).Finally, the author lays out some of the alternatives, or complements, to external review and how they are useful or limited in mitigating abusive behavior. Any system must be perceived as accessible, confidential, prompt, impartial and even-handed and policymakers will need to ask themselves how to measure the success of any review board. A review board alone cannot always deter misconduct or provide adequate remedies. Despite the obstacles, lawyers must persevere with civil suits for damages and criminal prosecutions. Nongovernmental organizations must petition human rights tribunals and continue to "mobilize shame" against 'the immigration authorities and the U.S. government in all available forums.

One Dollar Per Day: The Slaving Wages of Immigration Jail Work Programs - A History and Legal Analysis, 1943-Present

This Paper evaluates the legality of the $1 per day payments for work performed by those in custody under immigration laws as well as its genesis. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an order moving the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) out of the Department of Labor and into the Justice Department. During this same time frame, the U.S. Government established internment camps for enemy aliens, i.e., civilians in the United States and other countries in Latin America who were or were imagined to be citizens of Axis powers. In 1943, the Justice Department paid those so held 80 cents per day for their work performed in the camps; the average daily cost of each person's detention in 1943 was one dollar. This was the origins of the 1950 law authorizing paying those in custody under immigration laws for work performed. If those in immigration custody today were paid at the ratio from 1943, they would be earning about $80 per day. This paper draws on government documents and contracts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as well as the program's implementation and history as the basis for a statutory analysis of the Government's defense of its legality. The Paper argues that under a reading of the relevant laws' plain meaning, legislative history, and purpose, the program appears to violate various labor laws and the Fifth, Sixth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Deporting Dissidence

This essay examines Mexican immigrant political and labor activism in Chicago through the life of Refugio Roman Martinez, an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) who was deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Martinez’s history suggests that Mexican immigrant CIO members tended to be proud Mexican citizens motivated to join US unions by their understanding of the Mexican Revolution and rise of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas (1934–1940). These Mexican immigrants campaigned for labor and immigration improvements and encouraged Mexicans to enter unions to attain equity; however, they concurrently rebuffed US naturalization as a means to achieve these ends. Indeed, Mexican immigrants fought for labor rights while rejecting US citizenship and did so in part because they were conscious of US hegemony and found it too intellectually problematic to become US citizens and to appeal to the US state for justice. As the United States entered the Cold War, immigrants paid a price for joining the US labor movement while retaining their foreign citizenship. From the Southwest to the Midwest, the INS disciplined immigrant labor leaders through deportation.

Women Without A Country—And Health CareEntitled To Nothing: The Struggle For Immigrant Health Care In The Age Of Welfare Reform by Park Lisa Sun-Hee New York (NY) : New York University Press , 2011 205 pp.; $65.00 (cloth), $21.00 (paper)

Women Without A Country—And Health CareEntitled To Nothing: The Struggle For Immigrant Health Care In The Age Of Welfare Reform by Park Lisa Sun-Hee New York (NY) : New York University Press , 2011 205 pp.; $65.00 (cloth), $21.00 (paper)

An Analysis of Latino-Korean Relations in the Workplace: Latino Perspectives in the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest

Mainstream interpretations of 1992 Los Angeles unrest had little to sat about Mexicans or Central Americans. Instead of, TV commemorators honed in on the black-Korean tensions while neglecting Latino-Korean relations. As Jinah Kim points out, overemphasis on the subjugation of black subjectivity “overshadows other systematic diagnoses of the civil unrest and places the focus on blackness as the object of, and solution to, social discord; African Americans remain America's (race) victims and America's (race) solution. “ Through largely portrayed in the national media as a black uprising were a near majority (approximately 49 percent) in the neighborhoods most affected by the unrest: South Central, Koreatown, and Pico Union. From a total of 5,633 arrests, “51 percent of those arrested were Latino; 30 percent of those who died were Latino”, more than 12 percent of the damaged businesses were Latino owned. A third of the Latinos arrested were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) an...

Intercountry Adoption Flows from Africa to the U.S.: A Fifth Wave of Intercountry Adoptions?

This article addresses whether there is the beginning of a fifth wave of intercountry adoptions (ICAs) from Africa to the United States (U.S.). ICAs function as a “quiet migration” of children [Weil (1984) International Migration Review 18(2):276–293; Lovelock (2000) International Migration Review 34 (3):907–949; Selman (2002) Population Research and Policy Review 21:205–225]. U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) data from 1971 to 2009 indicate that there were 421,085 ICAs to the U.S. Tarmann (2003:2, http://www.prb.org/Articles/2003/InternationalAdoptionRateinUSDoubledinthel990s.aspx?p=1 ) reported that in 2000, U.S. parents completed one ICA for every 200 births. In the past, top sending countries have followed flows from Europe, South America, and Asia. INS data are used to analyze the increase in the intercountry adoptees from Africa from 1996 to 2009. Similar Hague Convention data are used for the comparison of the number of ICAs from Africa to other top recipient nations. Demographic and economic data are used to support the suggestion that ICAs, similar to other migratory flows, are from developing to developed countries.