Immigration Raids Research Articles

ICE comes to Tennessee: violence work and abolition in the Appalachian South

ABSTRACT By way of a case study of a key Trump-era Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) workplace raid amidst the arrival of 287(g) programs in Eastern Tennessee, this article places the violence of the carceral state in relation to the ongoing work of emancipation in the American South. It 1) reconceptualizes immigration enforcement as a key locus for intensifying the carceral state’s power via a specific form of violence work and 2) maps the manner in which horizons of abolition take shape in the shadow of this violence. The radical reimagining of immigration as the abolition of policing, detention, and borders is linked to everyday grassroots efforts that seek to counter the pervasive state violence of 287(g) policies. Distinct forms of relational care have slowed and, in some cases, halted the political dominance of carcerality, drawing upon historic emancipatory projects of Southern abolition democracy.

Cultivating Feminist Transnational Practice with Immigrant Women: A Collaborative Autoethnography

This article applies methods of collaborative autoethnography and participatory education dialogues to explore our evolving “trans” national/disciplinary cultural practice with immigrant women and girls. Drawing from Latinx and Chicanx scholar/activist explorations of healing centered on indigenous and Afrodiasporic worldviews, we reflect on our continuing learning in the aftermath of the massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement workplace raid targeting indigenous immigrant women (New Bedford 2007). We initiated a continued deepening toward cultural practice grounded in transnational women of color social movements. We explore practices enhancing connections between therapy and social justice advocacy, applying transnational feminist and multi-systemic ecological models linking personal and social change. We focus on educational settings as especially favorable in transforming gendered developmental pathways toward bienestar/wellness as fairness. Finally, we recommend critical/participatory methods of reflexivity, autoethnography, dialogue-promoting learning, healing, and empowered social action.

Do Immigration Raids Deter Head Start Enrollment?

We investigate the local deterrence effect of immigration raids on Hispanic Head Start enrollment. Using a nationwide panel of raids from 2006 to 2008, a time of intensified immigration enforcement across communities in the US, we find robust evidence that raids decreased Hispanic Head Start enrollment by around 10 percent. We disentangle this impact and find evidence that this decrease is driven by a deterrence effect rather than a mobility effect, which suggests that families are staying in their communities but not enrolling their children in Head Start.

Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid by William D. Lopez

Book Reviews 199 shrinking tax base, nor could bankruptcy bring back lost federal and state support to offset pressures on public welfare.” (xix) That last point about the loss of federal and state aid is a key to the puzzle. As Kirshner writes, assistance to cities peaked in 1978. Since then, Detroit and other cities have lost out on untold billions in dollars that were once promised but never delivered. “We have overestimated the ability of cities and their residents to combat powerful forces like automation, suburbanization, the recent financial crisis and deindustrialization,” she writes. (xxii) A reader might quibble that all cities suffer many of the same problems as Detroit. But, as Kirshner asserts, the Motor City may represent the extreme end of the scale of urban distress. And she is certainly on target that the highly touted bankruptcy—one of the transformative events in Detroit’s recent history—did little or nothing for many of the city’s struggling residents. “The lives that Broke chronicles show us what bankruptcy cannot accomplish,” she concludes in a downbeat cod. “They show us the hard work of combating individual poverty must take precedence over facile, short-term urban fixes.” (283) That’s a lesson of special relevance for Detroit. As Miles, one of the people Kirshner profiles, tells her in the book, “Detroit’s a good thing when it’s going good.” (xv) But no city can prosper if it’s at its best only when the going is good. John Gallagher Author and journalist William D. Lopez. Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 232. Works cited. Hardcover: $27.95. William D. Lopez’s Separated details how mixed-status families navigate everyday life and institutions by focusing on a Midwestern county in Michigan. Mixed-status families are those that have a parent or parents in the United States without citizenship while their kids might. Separated focuses on an immigration raid of an auto shop and the deportation of a person named Santiago. It highlights the experiences of individuals in the raid beyond Santiago that was led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents with the help of local police departments to show the trauma they create within multiple families via the deportability of individuals. 200 The Michigan Historical Review The interactions between people from Santiago’s family with agencies and institutions are used by Lopez to stress that the border is enforced far from a southern wall. He writes that the stories in the book are violent and life altering by showing how enforcement tactics are militarized with “little regard to the physical and psychological damage done to those at whom they are directed, their families, or their communities.” (15) Separated uses Washtenaw County to analyze people’s relationship with the US deportation machine by detailing how it operates in their everyday lives whether citizen or not. Lopez argues that while we must look at the extravagant displays of police violence, there is also much to be gained by examining the difficulty mixed-status families face when trying to navigate things as simple as purchasing groceries. The book is split into three sections surrounding the events of the raid. Part I explores the community and its people before the raid while the two chapters in Part II explore the raid itself. Part III approaches the aftermath of the raid, which is followed by a conclusion and epilogue that highlight the months post-raid to understand the longer-lasting ramifications and impact of deportations on families. Lopez uses over twenty-four interviews to analyze the context of the raid. This includes interviews with family members involved, local community activists, and police officials. He combines these with ethnography and thick description of the neighborhood based on living and volunteering in the community and going for ride-alongs with police officers. A major contribution the book makes about ICE, policing, and the deportation machine is the ramifications on mixed-status families and their mental and physical health. For example, Lopez indicates how a mother could no longer produce breast milk due to the susto, or scare, they experienced during the raid...

Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises by Jodie Adams Kirshner

198 The Michigan Historical Review the dark side,” readers can come to a greater appreciation of the team’s glories. (8) Hunter’s book represents a worthy contribution to Detroit’s baseball history, and likewise belongs on the shelf of any true crime fan. Scott Ferkovich Detroit, Michigan Jodie Adams Kirshner. Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2019. Pp. 368. Notes. Index. Hardcover: $28.99. The City of Detroit’s trip through municipal bankruptcy in 2013-14 is generally hailed as a great success. The process wiped $7 billion in debt from the city’s books. It gave Mayor Mike Duggan fiscal running room to expand programs like city planning. And it allowed the city to modernize its woefully inadequate city services. But as author Jodie Adams Kirshner points out in Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises, bankruptcy left important players in Detroit untouched—the ordinary residents mired in poverty and joblessness. Broke thus provides a needed corrective to the current image of Detroit as a “comeback city.” While great advances have been celebrated, particularly in the newly fashionable downtown, Midtown, Corktown, and other districts, vast areas of the sprawling city remain virtually untouched by any improvements. Kirshner’s pointillist approach follows several Detroiters identified by their first names—Joe, Miles, Cindy, Lola, among others—as they scrape out an economic existence in a city beset with high unemployment and little opportunity. Among other woes, the city’s housing market virtually collapsed during the Great Recession, and much of Broke follows Kirshner’s actors as they try to buy or hold on to a house facing tax foreclosure, vandalism, and heartless speculation by real estate vultures. The accumulation of detail creates a portrait of despair. At an ice cream parlor, workers dish up scoops from behind bullet-proof glass. A long-ago brush with the law that never leaves his record endlessly dogs the character Miles. Joe, a handyman, hires an ex-convict to help with some work and “the man agreed but told him robbing houses and selling drugs paid better.” (101) “Bankruptcy could not provide new remedies against financial problems,” Kirshner writes. “It could not directly reverse the population loss, employment loss, or property value loss that contributed to the Book Reviews 199 shrinking tax base, nor could bankruptcy bring back lost federal and state support to offset pressures on public welfare.” (xix) That last point about the loss of federal and state aid is a key to the puzzle. As Kirshner writes, assistance to cities peaked in 1978. Since then, Detroit and other cities have lost out on untold billions in dollars that were once promised but never delivered. “We have overestimated the ability of cities and their residents to combat powerful forces like automation, suburbanization, the recent financial crisis and deindustrialization,” she writes. (xxii) A reader might quibble that all cities suffer many of the same problems as Detroit. But, as Kirshner asserts, the Motor City may represent the extreme end of the scale of urban distress. And she is certainly on target that the highly touted bankruptcy—one of the transformative events in Detroit’s recent history—did little or nothing for many of the city’s struggling residents. “The lives that Broke chronicles show us what bankruptcy cannot accomplish,” she concludes in a downbeat cod. “They show us the hard work of combating individual poverty must take precedence over facile, short-term urban fixes.” (283) That’s a lesson of special relevance for Detroit. As Miles, one of the people Kirshner profiles, tells her in the book, “Detroit’s a good thing when it’s going good.” (xv) But no city can prosper if it’s at its best only when the going is good. John Gallagher Author and journalist William D. Lopez. Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 232. Works cited. Hardcover: $27.95. William D. Lopez’s Separated details how mixed-status families navigate everyday life and institutions by focusing on a Midwestern county in Michigan. Mixed-status families are those that have a...

From Computational Thinking to Political Resistance

Working with Latinx adolescents and providing informal learning experiences through a voluntary after school program aimed at developing their computational thinking and competencies, discussions around the election of Donald Trump emerged as it was important for many students. Emergent bilinguals internalized the xenophobic discourse that was amplified during the presidential election season. Thus, students feared deportation, discrimination, and other forms of violence. Many students experienced their friends and families facing deportation due to the increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that occurred in 2016. The after-school program was a safe space in which we could provide a constructive and creative environment for students to comfortably explore these topics. In this paper, drawing on three pre-service teachers’ reflections, we explore how middle school urban Latinx students navigated their oppressors through computational thinking and show case a model of a critical pedagogy in an informal science education.

'I'm going to look for you and take your kids': Reproductive justice in the context of immigration enforcement.

Prior research has shown that immigration law enforcement contributes to poor health outcomes—including reproductive health outcomes—among Latinos. Yet no prior research has examined how immigration enforcement might inhibit reproductive justice and limit individual’s reproductive autonomy. We utilized data from an existing study that consisted of a partnership with a Latino community in Michigan in which an immigration raid resulted in multiple arrests and deportations midway through data collection. Using cross-sectional survey data (n = 192) where no one was re-interviewed, we used ordinal logistic regression to compare desired pregnancy timing of individuals surveyed prior to and after the raid to determine the impact of an immigration raid on desired timing of next pregnancy. We then used qualitative data—including 21 in-depth interviews and participant observation—collected in the community after the raid to contextualize our findings. Controlling for socio-demographic characteristics, we found that Latinos surveyed in the aftermath of the raid were more likely to report a greater desire to delay childbearing than Latinos surveyed before the raid occurred. Our qualitative data showed that an immigration raid has financial and psychological effects on immigrant families and that a raid may impact reproductive autonomy because people are fearful of these impacts. These finding suggest that current immigration enforcement efforts may influence reproductive decision-making, impede Latinos reproductive autonomy, and that family-friendly immigration policy reform is needed.

Challenges to Family Unity and Opportunities for Promoting Child Welfare in an Increasingly Punitive Immigration Landscape

This paper describes specific challenges to family unity and child welfare among children in immigrant families resulting from immigration enforcement. Surges in immigration activity over the past decade have resulted in family economic hardship, psychological trauma to children, and difficulty accessing social services. Children whose parents are detained/deported are at risk of unnecessarily entering the child welfare system, and encounter significant barriers to family reunification. In recent months, the scope of enforcement priorities that previously safeguarded many parents now target a much larger group of immigrants for deportation, increasingly disregarding the needs of children. Immigration raids have terrorized communities across the country, and repercussions are being felt by the child welfare system and social service providers. Within an anti-immigrant political climate, there is a desperate need for social workers to lead initiatives to respond to immigrants’ needs. Strategies include: (1) development of social work expertise in working with immigrants; (2) cross-systems and cross-disciplinary collaborations; (3) leveraging existing resources and supports; (4) documentation/collection of data; and (5) focused advocacy efforts.

Migration and Adolescent Health

Migration and Adolescent Health

The Ballad of Industry

This essay examines the role of arts and culture in processes of identity formation and collective action among day laborers in the United States. Focusing on the performance of “The Ballad of Industry,” a corrido (narrative poem set to music) that was written by a day laborer following an immigration raid at an informal hiring site in southern California, the essay explores how day laborers’ Popular Education praxis has been mobilized through music to build worker solidarity in the defense of hiring sites as a form of urban commons. It argues that the growing repertoire of day laborer songs functions as an interpretive medium through which events and subjectivities can be rendered intelligible and capable of galvanizing day laborer activism.

Immigration Raids, Employer Collusion and the Immigration Act 2016

Immigration Raids, Employer Collusion and the Immigration Act 2016

California Workers Get Ready For Workplace Immigration Raids

16 | International Union Rights | 24/2 FOCUS | UNITED STATES California Workers Get Ready For Workplace Immigration Raids At the end of February immigration agents descended on a handful of Japanese and Chinese restaurants in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi and in nearby Meridian. Fifty-five immigrant cooks, dishwashers, servers and bussers were loaded into vans and taken to a detention centre 158 miles away in Jena, Louisiana. Their arrest and subsequent treatment did more than provoke outrage among Jackson’s immigrant rights activists. Worker advocates in California also took note of the incident, fearing that it marked the beginning of a new wave of immigrant raids and enforcement actions in workplaces. In response, they’ve written a Bill with legal protections for workers, to keep the experience from being duplicated here. At the same time, training sessions have started to ensure workers know their rights during any jobrelated immigration enforcement action. Once the Mississippi restaurant workers had been arrested, they essentially fell off the radar screen for several days. Jackson lawyer Jeremy Litton, who represented three Guatemalan workers picked up in the raid, could not get the government to schedule hearing dates for them. He was unable to verify that the other detained immigrants were being held in the same centre, or even who they were. The Geo Corporation, formerly known as the Wackenhut Corporation, operates the LaSalle Detention Center. Geo’s roots go back to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which became notorious in the first half of the twentieth century for brutal, violent assaults on unions and strikes. Today Geo operates 16 immigrant detention centres around the country, according to its 2015 annual report. It runs privatised prisons as well, some of which have been investigated by the Federal government over bad conditions and understaffing. The LaSalle facility has 1160 beds. Litton says it is normally full, so taking in an additional 55 detainees would result in severe overcrowding. The use of Jena’s immigrant jail to hold workers detained in workplace raids has a bitter history in Mississippi. In 2008, 481 workers were arrested at a Howard Industries electrical equipment factory, in Laurel, Mississippi, in the middle of union negotiations. They too were taken to the La Salle detention centre. There they were fed peanut butter sandwiches at mealtimes, and according to Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), “there weren’t even enough beds and people were sleeping on the floor”. Eight workers detained in that raid were charged with aggravated identity theft in Federal court, for having given a false Social Security number to the employer when they were hired. “This latest raid is causing a lot of fear in our community”, according to MIRA director Bill Chandler. “There’s fear everywhere now because of the threats from Trump, but here in Mississippi our history of racism makes fear even stronger”. Agustin Ramirez, an organiser for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in California, says the Mississippi raid has heightened fear here too. “What we have seen in the past, and the threats from Trump, tell us this is coming. We may not have had a raid like this here yet, but we can see the sky is dark, and we know it’s going to rain. We just don’t know when”. The legislative response in California came from United Service Workers West, the union for janitors, security guards and airport workers affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. “We want to lead the nation with the strongest resistance efforts to protect workers, not just in the community, but in the workplace”, explained David Huerta, USWW President. In California, with many times the immigrant population of Mississippi, the potential impact of workplace raids is enormous. Of the nation’s estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants, over 2.6 million live in this state. They make up almost half of its farm workers, and over twenty percent of its construction workers. Almost one in every ten California workers is undocumented. The National Restaurant Association says that of the country’s twelve million restaurant workers, nine percent are undocumented, while the Restaurant Opportunities Center estimates that in large cities they make up almost half of...

California Workers Get Ready For Workplace Immigration Raids

California Workers Get Ready For Workplace Immigration Raids

Dream chasers: immigration and the American backlash

How the immigration battle plays out in America, from curriculum disputes to federal raids to the civil rights activism of young Dreamers. Illegal immigration continues to roil politics. The right-wing media stir up panic over anchor babies, job stealing, welfare dependence, bilingualism, al-Qaeda terrorists disguised as Latinos, even a conspiracy by Latinos to retake the Southwest. State and local governments have passed more than 300 laws that attempt to restrict undocumented immigrants' access to hospitals, schools, food stamps, and driver's licenses. Federal immigration authorities stage factory raids that result in arrests, deportations, and broken families-and leave owners scrambling to fill suddenly open jobs. The DREAM Act, which would grant permanent residency to high school graduates brought here as minors, is described as amnesty. And yet polls show that a majority of Americans support some kind of path to citizenship for those here illegally. What is going on? In this book, John Tirman shows how the resistance to immigration in America is more cultural than political. Although cloaked in language about jobs and secure borders, the cultural resistance to immigration expresses a fear that immigrants are changing the dominant white, Protestant, real American culture. Tirman describes the mentality of our response to immigration, which seeks violent solutions for a social phenomenon. He considers the culture clash over Chicano ethnic studies in Tucson, examines the consequences of an immigration raid in New Bedford, and explores the civil rights activism of young Dreamers. The current round them up, deport them, militarize the border approach, Tirman shows, solves nothing.

Health Implications of an Immigration Raid: Findings from a Latino Community in the Midwestern United States

Immigration raids exemplify the reach of immigration law enforcement into the lives of Latino community members, yet little research characterizes the health effects of these raids. We examined the health implications of an immigration raid that resulted in multiple arrests and deportations and occurred midway through a community survey of a Latino population. We used linear regression following principal axis factoring to examine the influence of raid timing on immigration enforcement stress and self-rated health. We controlled for age, sex, relationship status, years in the county in which the raid occurred, children in the home, and nativity. 325 participants completed the survey before the raid and 151 after. Completing the survey after the raid was associated with higher levels of immigration enforcement stress and lower self-rated health scores. Findings indicate the negative impact of immigration raids on Latino communities. Immigration discussions should include holistic assessments of health.

Change in birth outcomes among infants born to Latina mothers after a major immigration raid.

Growing evidence indicates that immigration policy and enforcement adversely affect the well-being of Latino immigrants, but fewer studies examine 'spillover effects' on USA-born Latinos. Immigration enforcement is often diffuse, covert and difficult to measure. By contrast, the federal immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, in 2008 was, at the time, the largest single-site federal immigration raid in US history. We employed a quasi-experimental design, examining ethnicity-specific patterns in birth outcomes before and after the Postville raid. We analysed Iowa birth-certificate data to compare risk of term and preterm low birthweight (LBW), by ethnicity and nativity, in the 37 weeks following the raid to the same 37-week period the previous year ( n = 52 344). We model risk of adverse birth outcomes using modified Poisson regression and model distribution of birthweight using quantile regression. Infants born to Latina mothers had a 24% greater risk of LBW after the raid when compared with the same period 1 year earlier [risk ratio (95% confidence interval) = 1.24 (0.98, 1.57)]. No such change was observed among infants born to non-Latina White mothers. Increased risk of LBW was observed for USA-born and immigrant Latina mothers. The association between raid timing and LBW was stronger among term than preterm births. Changes in birthweight after the raid primarily reflected decreased birthweight below the 5th percentile of the distribution, not a shift in mean birthweight. Our findings highlight the implications of racialized stressors not only for the health of Latino immigrants, but also for USA-born co-ethnics.

From Barbies to Boycotts: How Immigration Raids in Arizona Created a Ten-Year Old Activist

Increasingly hostile and unpredictable immigration policies can have traumatizing consequences for children of undocumented immigrants. This case study examines the way that increased practices of detention and deportation affect the childhood and adolescence of young people living in an anti-immigrant state like Arizona. Specifically, the life story of Katherine Figueroa during Arizona’s anti-immigrant climate, illustrates the struggle and implications for mixed-status families. The findings demonstrate the extent to which being separated from her parents influenced her mental health and academic life. The themes outlined in this paper suggest that in a continued repressive political context, children’s preoccupations and experiences with family separation are likely to have lasting consequences as these children transition into adulthood. Additionally, this study describes how community organizing, resources, support, and a proactive response to family separation can change the outcomes of parental detention. Findings from this study reveal, for educators, school administrators, counselors, community practitioners, and policy makers, how familial documentation status can have equally complex and lasting consequences for children’s academic, emotional, and physical well-being.

Immigrant integration models in “illegal” communities: Postville Iowa's shadow context

Immigrant integration models in rural communities are limited because they do not acknowledge the context of illegality that exists within communities that have a high concentration of unauthorised immigrants. In this in-depth case study of Postville, Iowa (the site of an infamous US immigration raid), I examine current rural immigrant community integration strategies under a shadow context of illegality and unauthorised immigrant labour. I find that underground and informal relationships within the towns' employers, immigrants, civic leaders, and native townspeople sustain a shadow context of exploitation and community instability. My research demonstrates that communities with large unauthorised immigrant populations rely on both formal and informal immigrant integration strategies to create “welcoming” immigrant communities. The formal strategies are multicultural approaches that rely on “diversity champions” to instil a climate of inclusion but do not tackle structural issues that place unauthorised communities at risk. The informal strategies rely on tacit understandings of community behaviour that just perpetuate the structural conditions of exploitation present in rural towns. These two forms of immigrant integration strategies support a shadow context that breeds vulnerability and risk for unauthorised immigrants, even in an immigrant “welcoming” environment.

Waiting for the State: Sex Work and the Neoliberal Governance of Sexuality

��� Focussing primarily on a public HIV/AIDS prevention clinic, this article considers the changing relationship between sex workers and the Costa Rican state, demonstrating that the state’s approach to policing the sex industry has been defined by a shift from collective repression to neoliberal individualism. Instead of the indiscriminate sanitary raids and mass incarceration of the past, waiting for health care has come to play a central role in how sex workers interact with the neoliberal state. Significantly, this move towards making sex workers into individuals accountable for their own health has included undocumented migrants. However, the individualising effect of neoliberal state formations has occurred specifically within the public health sector, as the state does make an important distinction between sex workers in its use of immigration raids at San Jose ´ ’s most notorious sex tourism business. Neoliberal rationalities of sexual governance ultimately separate and differentiate, and this article demonstrates the ways in which neoliberal state power operates both through the mundaneness of waiting at the HIV/AIDS prevention clinic and through the spectacle of immigration raids. Thinking about how the Costa Rican state has approached the control of sex work demonstrates the inconsistencies and contradictions of neoliberal governance, and the selectivity of neoliberal state formation.

Racing and gendering immigration politics: analyzing contemporary immigration enforcement using intersectional analysis

This article examines racialization and gendering processes at work in the proliferation of large-scale immigration raids and military-style roundups that affected disproportionately Latina/o immigrants during the height of the war on terror. These raids which took place in sensitive federal facilities, commercial employment sites, and residences resulted in widespread fear and rapid increases in the apprehension, detention, and deportations of immigrants. Utilizing an intersectional analysis the study dissects three distinct manifestations of race and gender in the raids, each of which highlights a different aspect of recent enforcement practices, while pointing to different applications of race and gender in immigration studies and Political Science: (1) the proliferation of Latina immigrants apprehended and placed in detention; (2) the passage of gendered legislation facilitating the raids; and (3) the invocation of race and gendered discourse within the federal government to justify and defend the raids. Ultimately, employing an intersectional approach provides a more thorough accounting of the multiple constraints at work in immigration politics that is significant to both our understanding of the past and efforts to construct reforms for the future.