Crimmigration

An interview on the ever-expanding electronic infrastructure used to monitor migrants (Part One) MediaJustice Follow Aug 30 · 6 min read In recent months ICE has been conducting a huge number of raids, dragging people from their families, often away from communities where they have lived for many years. Part of the technology involved in executing these raids has been the GPS monitors that shackle more than 40,000 individuals under the supervision of ICE. Our project, Challenging E-Carceration (part of the #NoDigitalPrisons campaign) has sought to better understand how ICE is using these GPS devices in their attacks on and management of migrant bodies. Fortunately, we caught up with scholar Daniel Gonzalez, who has been researching all this for several years. Our project director, James Kilgore, had a conversation with Daniel, which we will be sharing in two parts. Here's Part One: James Kilgore: In your writing you talk a lot about borders. You seem to be saying that we often have a simplistic understanding of what a border is in the 21st century. Can you explain your understanding of borders? Daniel Gonzalez: For a long time we have equated borders with walls and fences. I think this is a mistake because it leads us to talk about who belongs in the US in a very limited way. Moreover, it distracts us from other border sites and practices. For me, the border is the physical structures that geographically demarcate a nation-state and the personnel, technologies, practices, and knowledge that enforce immigration and trade policy. More speciBcally, I focus on a database infrastructure called Investigative Case Management (ICM) that connects all these aspects. ICM-not a wall-is the current border's backbone. Looking at this larger border infrastructure reveals the border's investment in managing people inside the US. Reframing border practices in terms of interior AND exterior management highlights the historic relationship between border politics, racism, and the US' need for devalued labor. Borders aren't always about keeping certain people out; rather they can also act as supply chains that funnel in and then monitor a certain kind of (racialized and right-less) labor. While ICM is new, the kind of work the border does now isn't. For example, photos from the 20th century Bracero program show the US-Mexico border operating like a waiting line: laborers were allowed in at certain times and under speciBc, terminable conditions. Even back then migrant laborers were monitored and managed-from the documentation they needed in order to work, the border checkpoints they went through, and the transportation to and from the worksite. At times, they were even forced to live in labor camps. However many migrants fought to improve their conditions and found ways to integrate into US society. The inability to permanently track and manage these workers is one of the reasons why the US government (despite resistance from the agriculture industry) ended the program in the mid-1960s. Now, however, the border can constantly track migrants' entire lives at home and work. This ensures a precarious migrant labor force and guarantees that migrants will be constantly monitored and managed, limiting resistance and migrants' ability to improve their conditions. So, if a migrant becomes disruptive or if their labor is no longer needed, then they are easily deportable. Historically, US borders have always been better at monitoring migrants than they have been at denying entry, and focusing on ICM allows us to see how US border policy is currently creating and securing a precarious labor force. James: I am especially interested in electronic monitoring (EM). From my research, it seems that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses EM diLerently than law enforcement and the overall criminal legal system. Most people under ICE's monitoring are not under house arrest, don't pay user fees and don't report to a personal supervisor like a probation oNcer. Even though they are on GPS-enabled monitors that track their location, they don't seem to be punished for traveling away from home. I am not implying that the use of EM on migrants is not oppressive, but I want to understand why it is diLerent. Do you have some ideas on this? I am especially interested in the ways in which immigrants are criminalized as a result of this practice. Daniel: This is a question of "target population" and how state institutions understand certain groups of people. Departments of Corrections and pretrial authorities employ EM to geographically contain criminalized people: EM ties people to their houses, severely and constantly limiting mobility. ICE, on the other hand, has a di\erent (but not unrelated) goal-monitoring people's mobility. DOC uses EM as an extension of mass incarceration. But ICE doesn't want to completely incarcerate a cheap labor force-it merely wants to keep labor cheap and precarious. ICE also uses EM to monitor the area that a person is or is not allowed to enter, but this monitoring usually allows for greater mobility than monitoring under DOC. The recent raids suggest that ICE also uses EM to help track a person or group after it is determined that they are disruptive, break the law, use public institutions or services, or when their labor is simply no longer needed. Then, ICE intervenes, detains, and deports. Migrants already enter the US labor force criminalized and with limited rights, and ICE waits to capitalize on that precarity. Migrants already enter the US labor force criminalized and with limited rights, and ICE waits to capitalize on that precarity. James: Earlier this month ICE raided seven workplaces in Mississippi and took nearly 700 workers into custody. A number of reports indicated that ICE made use of GPS tracking of location to target workers in the plant. Can you explain how that might have worked and tell us whether this is common practice? Daniel: Electronic monitoring is a GPS and data-collection technology (often wearable) that records and sends a person's life-activity patterns-including location-based data-to central information-processing centers, like DHS Fusion Centers. In these centers local, state, and federal agencies ensure the coordination of information and plan action across government institutions. ICE uses this information to make operative decisions, such as locating people who miss a routine check-in. In large-scale raids, however, ICE already has a goal: it is not just responding to a speciBc infraction; ICE also uses EM data to plan the logistics of the raid. Considering the frequency of these large-scale workplace raids and the increase in funding DHS spends on these surveillance and information technologies, I think that GPS is playing a critical role for ICE and may play an even larger role in the future. The SmartLINK smartphone app that ICE in Miami is currently using, for example, has taken EM to another level by combining GPS and facial recognition. It's also important to keep in mind that the use of GPS to monitor migrants in the workplace is not new. DHS funding documents on prototypes from the early 2000s indicate that employer information was also networked into this migrant management system. These prototypes integrated community-based support programs (noncitizen sponsorship) with EM and provided ICE-contracted caseworkers with access to workplaces, encouraging a conbation of interest between ICE and employers.

This paper theorizes the circulation of violence in the realms of immigration and labor. Through Walter Benjamin, I conceptualize the relationship between racial violence and law and note that while violence can support the authority of law, excessive violence makes law vulnerable to decay. This tension between authority and excess is eased by humanitarianism. I find clues for disrupting this circulation in Benjamin’s twin notions of the real state of exception and the general strike, introduced two decades apart and invested in theorizing how labor and other marginalized groups threaten the stability of law supported by violence. This reconstruction proceeds alongside an examination of the contemporary US regime of immigration enforcement, which combines the excessive violence of detention and deportation with marginal humanitarian adjustments, which ultimately legitimate violence. On the disruptive side, a Benjaminian reading of labor activism by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers offers three dimensions of emancipatory politics: (a) practices of refusal (to engage on the terms of the immigration debate), (b) the establishment of historical constellations (of racial regulation of labor constitutive of law), and (c) divine violence (through exposure of lawful violence in the food production chain).

The criminalization of Muslims-framing an Islamic religious identity as a problem to be solved using state crime control logic-is undeniably in process in the United States. Local, state, and federal statutes target Muslims for surveillance and exclusion, and media sources depict Muslims as synonymous with terrorism, as others have shown. This paper analyzes the public's role in the criminalization of Islam, which I call "cr-Islamization." Drawing on in-depth, qualitative interviews in a major Southwest city during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, I detail how the majority of 144 politically, racially, and economically diverse interviewees talk about Muslims as a potential "racial threat," using "fear of crime" language indicative of the mass incarceration era. This suggests that criminalization theory should be central to sociological studies of Muslims in the contemporary United States, and that criminal-ization rhetoric remains powerful, despite mainstream enthusiasm for criminal justice reform. I argue that criminalization's power might reside in its ability to mutate in the "post-racial" era. The mechanisms supporting crimmigration, the criminalization of black Americans, and cr-Islamization are related but not identical. Muslims are religiously and racially subjugated, but more economically secure compared to other criminalized groups. This paper's findings should prompt scholars to reexamine the relationships between racialization, criminalization, religious subjugation, and economic exploitation in the twenty-first century United States.

In this paper, I explore the relevance of Hannah Arendt's work in terms of the merging of the US criminal justice and immigration systems beginning in the mid-1990s. Arendt's work importantly suggested that the stateless were a contemporary phenomenon and so rightless that they lacked even the rights of criminals. In many respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the degree to which innocent refugees are dehumanized due to their foreign status in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreign and citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence. Arendt's binary also indicates an adherence to cryptonormativity, despite her professed anti-foundational approach to political issues. Arendt's analyses of how racism (the "nation" in a eugenic context) "conquer[ed]" the state (that is, the rule of law, democratic equality, and the right to rights) and her identification of totalitarian tools (such as disenfranchisement, camps, and deportation) explain how the category of criminal could approach that of stateless "outlaw" and yet her work does not always fulfill this critical promise. Rather, even in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the binary drawn between criminal and stateless person is indicative of a more ambivalent and sometimes idealized treatment of her subject matter both in terms of historical approach and empirical comparisons she makes. My aim is to understand both the critical force and limitations of Arendt's work in and of itself and also in relation to the merging of US criminal and immigration policies today. I conclude by urging scholars not to dismiss Arendt as overly contradictory (e.g.) but rather to learn not only from her not only from her important theories but also weaknesses in her empirical analyses. Together, her theoretical strength and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)understandings of a set of complex and uncertain circumstances we experience today in the crimmigration system.

This essay engages with Juliet Hooker's Theorizing Race in the Americas and her methodology of "hemispheric juxtaposition." I reconstruct how her theorization of hemispheric entanglements complicate the traditional alignments between race, civilization, and empire. Based on this reconstruction, I scrutinize three potentially problematic pro-immigrant narratives in activism and scholarship: (a) humanitarianism, (b) crimmigration, and (c) social scientific.

This article examines the intersections of the child protection, immigration and criminal systems and the carceral logics that undergird all three systems. Taking seriously Patricia Hill Collins (2017) call to analyze “intensified points of convergence” (p.1464) we analyze the role of social work in perpetuating carceral systems and the tools that feminist social work provides for disrupting them. Using a case analysis of a foster child in Halifax, Canada, who in 2018 was faced with deportation after social workers failed to secure his citizenship status, we argue that a pipeline exists between child protection and a growing ‘crimmigration’ system. The carceral logics of this pipeline not only draw from anti-Black, Islamophobic, and settler colonial histories of oppression, but they also position certain non-citizen families as unassimilable and requiring of state intervention rather than social supports. With this carceral pipeline in mind, we then draw from feminist anti-carceral and intersectional approaches to consider a range of resistance strategies. Ultimately, we argue for a transformative justice approach that goes beyond reforming the pipeline, and instead takes seriously the insights of abolitionist movements as an alternative to purely reformist approaches.

Imagine, for a second, that your home country has all of a sudden erupted into civil war. You find yourself on the “wrong side” of the political divide, living in constant fear that you will one day face government retaliation in the form of violence or even death. Besides having to witness your friends and family members being imprisoned and their homes destroyed by bombs, you have been living a life of near-impoverishment. There is never enough food, water, and resources to go around the community during the war. You haven’t gone to school in years and any hope that you will ever attend is destroyed. All the while, conditions are worsening to the point that you and your family are now considering drastic action: fleeing to the United States. The journey is grueling and will traumatize you for years, as you have to cross the South China Sea in an overcrowded vessel battling disease, starvation, and even pirates. Nonetheless, you find yourself at the mercy of an entirely new country. You are starting life all over again with absolutely no resources, support, or language skills, excluded to the confines of a low-income community with few opportunities for social mobility. As the months go by, you are still barely able to pull yourself out of poverty. Joining a gang seems the only viable option to increase your stock in life, and so, you commit a “crime” to feed your family, protect yourself, pay the bills, whatever your needs are at the moment. You are then arrested by the police, given a harsh sentence disproportionate to the gravity of the crime, and your Green card is revoked. As a stateless refugee, you have no choice but to comply and serve your time. After your release years later and having established your own business in the community, you are told that due to changes in US-Vietnam relations, your past crime that you have just served time for makes you eligible for deportation and being sent back to the country you fled from years ago.

My motivations for forging a Southeast Asian Critical Theory (SEACrit) are borne out of my experiences growing up Vietnamese-American in the melting pot borough of Queens, New York. I am a child of refugee parents who fled the Vietnam War during the 1980s, although most people wouldn’t know it by looking at me— To them, I present as any other fair-skinned Chinese or Korean with successful, entrepreneurial parents. The fact that I possess a post-graduate education and white-collar job didn’t help. Growing up, I can recount numerous instances in which my identity was made to be cheapened, overlooked, and invisibilized. There was the time a friend of mine parroted me around a stranger. “Where do you think she’s from?”, she drunkenly asked him, “From Vietnam! You would never guess!” When I was in high school, I was the butt of all Asian jokes: “Oh I’m sure you’ll do fine on the exam, Colleen. Just use your Asian powers!”, “You got a D in precalculus? What kind of Asian are you?!”, “You’re the worst Asian!”, and my perennial favorite “How good are you at massaging?”. Most recently, a coworker showed up to my surprise birthday party to “sing happy birthday in Chinese” and proceeded to shout “Ching Chong Ching Chong” at the top of his lungs, even though I told him repeatedly that I identified as Vietnamese and he knew it. These are a drop in the bucket of all the microaggressions and both covert and overt discrimination that I have encountered thus far, and that Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong) as a whole experience in America. The history of Asians constitute a minute chapter in most Americans’ education and social imagination, and the history of Southeast Asians is virtually nonexistent. Very little is known about our community outside the context of war, ethnic enclaves, and really good cuisine. Such hyperinvisibilization of the Southeast Asian experience serves to further marginalize refugees and children of refugees who may not have it as easy as the stereotypical Asian most people have in mind, contributing to the notion that they do not need access to support or services. Thus, the goal of this paper is to examine this hyperinivisibilization of Southeast Asians in America and how it interacts with various mechanisms of the American racial project— Asianization, racially-ascribed deviance, relative invalidation, colorism, and anti-Black ideology within the Asian community— to produce  a particularly unique and complex racialization process for Southeast Asians. Additionally, SEACrit will also highlight resulting policies past and present towards Southeast Asian peoples having to do with what Juliet Stumpf termed the “crimmigration system” that are rooted in a form of double displacement and position Southeast Asians as both inferior and alien. And lastly, SEACrit celebrates the values that our community holds dear: giving back to parents and the community, resistance and resilience, and activism in challenging dominant ideologies and furthering social justice, and charts new potential waters for resisting the crimmigration system through institutional policy and practice. My hope is that Southeast Asian activists, scholars, and the community at large will use these tenets as well as knowledge of their history of organizing to mobilize for social change in the diaspora.

Cet article porte sur la criminalisation et l’enfermement croissants des jeunes des quartiers populaires et des primo-migrants, davantage encore de ceux qui se refusent à la résignation face à leur position de “laissés pour compte”. Il repose sur une pratique de terrain d’une vingtaine d’année et de multiples ethnographies de séjours situées principalement au Burkina Faso, en Belgique et à Malte. Le texte est subdivisé en trois parties. La première, davantage contextuelle, donne quelques éléments clefs qui permettent de documenter l’enferme­ment des précaires. La deuxième met l’accent sur les effets des processus de criminalisation et d’enfermement pour les principaux intéressés, mais aussi à l’échelle sociétale. La troisième partie, en conclusion du propos, interroge les tensions et les accointances entre logiques néolibérales et sécuritaires. Elle propose ainsi une relecture des actes condamnés des jeunes précarisés et des primo-migrants sous l’angle conjoint de l’adhésion au projet néolibéral et de la résistance aux mises au ban qui sont inhérentes à son fonctionnement inégalitaire.

Canada bars non-citizens from entering or staying in the country for a number of reasons, including for what immigration law treats as "criminality", "serious criminality" or "organized criminality". Criminal inadmissibility-including for rather minor criminalized acts-raises a number of concerns for those who are targeted, but also for border criminologists, prisoners' rights activists and migrant justice organizers. In this article, we discuss inadmissibility for "criminality" and "serious criminality" as: 1) a populist rhetorical move put forth by politicians promoting tough-on-crime / tough-on-immigration policies; 2) a form of double punishment that starts before deportation even takes place (and regardless of whether it does); and 3) a discretionary tactic in the policing toolbox to incapacitate people who are deemed undesirable. We illustrate the consequences of criminal inadmissibility by drawing from the experience of one of the co-authors who is facing deportation on this ground.

The contemporary convergence between immigration control and criminal justice, commonly referred to as crimmigration, entails a substantial reconfiguration of immigration control decision-making processes. One of the most significant features of this conversion is the increasing intervention of the criminal judiciary in matters related to immigration control. For instance, deportation can be in many cases a consequence of a criminal conviction for a considerable number of crimes, and bail or sentencing decisions can be influenced by the migratory status and the deportation likelihood of a defendant. Although empirical research upon the convergence between immigration and criminal law has rapidly grown in the last decade, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the judicial decision-making processes and determinants of immigration control within the realm of criminal courts. The present research purports to contribute to the scholarly research on such aspects by conducting an in-depth qualitative case-study analysis of a specific court setting. For that purpose, this dissertation focuses on Spain given that its legal migration regime shares many of the substantial aspects of the phenomenon described by the crimmigration concept. Despite irregular migration is not a criminal offence in that country, immigration detention is authorised by criminal judges and there is a series of expulsion (deportation) pathways available within criminal proceedings. Additionally, Spain is a relevant research location in this regard due to its crucial role at controlling the Southern border of the so-called ‘fortress Europe’. Drawing on 78 in-depth semi-structured interviews with judges, prosecutors, clerks, court personnel, defence attorneys and other legal professionals, as well as focused observation conducted for a period of eight months, this thesis seeks to ascertain the punitive meanings attributed by criminal court actors to immigration control. To do so, this research relies on organisational, social-psychological, and cultural frameworks for explaining judicial decision-making by criminal courts, focusing on immigration detention and expulsion throughout the criminal proceeding, which are in general administrative procedures under judicial supervision by criminal courts. Whilst assuming that the convergence between immigration control and criminal justice is a contemporary mechanism for the social construction of the ‘criminal immigrant’, the main findings of this study are structured in two parts. The first delves into the idiosyncratic features of immigration detention decision-making, and the second into the determinants and meanings ascribed by court actors to so called pre-trial, sentencing and post-sentence expulsion. This analysis evidences that immigration detention decision-making is substantially determined by the convergence of bureaucratically patterned decisional mechanics and the intrinsic criminal justice cultural identity of criminal courts. This embodies Kafkaesque dynamics characterised by automation, thoughtlessness and dehumanisation in decision-making. Furthermore, this research reveals that expulsion is a court’s culturally constructed punishment, defined more by the meanings produced and attributed to it by court actors than by its formal legal categorisation. Specifically, this thesis contends that expulsion is assessed by court actors in terms of its suitability for attaining such traditional purposes of punishment as incapacitation, deterrence and retribution. Therefore, this research concludes that immigration detention and expulsion are substantially traversed by the constitutive cultural identity of criminal courts, which in turn determines their key procedural traits and decisional outcomes.

Criminalizing "Pro-Immigrant" Initiatives: Reducing the Space of Human Action The article addresses the problem of the surveillance, disciplining and criminalization of practices of non-governmental initiatives which offer help to irregular migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Slovenia and four neighbouring countries. Based on original empirical work-interviews with members of NGOs-it analyses the dynamic of these processes through several stages of the "continuum of criminalization". Five types of crimmigration policies and practices of authorities and other actors were identified which produce cumulative effects and reduce space for both political and human action as well as spontaneity.

In this paper, I analyze elite discourse in the context of the increasing role played by large-scale corporate platforms in federal immigration enforcement in the US Specifically, I focus on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) alliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Incorporating Marx's (2016) "fallacy of explicit agendas" as a heuristic for contextualizing recent employee challenges to company CEO Jeff Bezos, I show how the fallacy serves to conceal far more about the AWS alliance with ICE, an organization with a long track record of deeply troubling practices. The secrecy that is fostered by such discourse also obscures the growing dependency of government entities on large-scale technologies of marginalizing surveillance that threaten civil liberties and rights of refugees and immigrants.

This article examines changes in the punitive bias of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in the 2012 through 2016 period. We define punitive biases as the officers' higher likelihood of expressing a written dissent with Low Risk Classifications cases when compared to high risk classification ones. We provide evidence that contextual factors enter into the immigration decision process in two different ways: one, by shifting the officers' frame of references based on the number of cases, the compounded risk portfolio available in processing centers (e.g. the caseloads flow), and in response to external shocks, such as elections. Second, by allowing policy preferences to edit the risk algorithm (i.e. inserting, deleting, and reweighting the importance given to different types of violations). The analysis draws data from 1.4 million immigration detention risk classification assessment cases between 2012 and 2016 received pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Immigration | electoral cycle | punitive bias | risk classification | immigration detention.