Immigrant Children in a Pol(ICE) State

Guided by the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of immigrant children attending schools in communities experiencing police brutality and anti-immigrant sentiments? (2) How do middle school children of immigrants visually represent their experiences with legal violence? and (3) What are children’s visions of freedom and community safety in this context?, this article highlights the understudied preadolescent children of immigrants through a 2-year study of a multidisciplinary theater class at a local elementary school in South Central Los Angeles. Data includes child interviews, class observations, artwork, and performance videos, from recently arrived Mexican and Central American children aged 10 to 13 years. Findings reveal how children come to understand policing, reinforcing concepts like “good cop/bad cop,” conflating local police and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, but also imagining alternatives for community safety outside of police systems. This work contributes to the fields of immigration, abolitionist education, and ethnic studies, among others, offering new ways of supporting immigrant children through the use of arts-based tools.

Sanctuary Cities, Focusing Events, and the Solidarity Shift: A Standard Measurement of the Prevalence of Victims for the Narrative Policy Framework

Numerous state and local jurisdictions across the United States have adopted policies limiting their cooperation with federal deportation efforts carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Sometimes referred to as “sanctuary cities,” these jurisdictions interpret federalism in a way that resists active participation in federal immigration enforcement. Employing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), we analyze 164 public consumption documents to examine policy narratives disseminated by interest groups engaged in the policy debate surrounding sanctuary cities between 2010 and 2017. Using data derived from a content analysis of these documents, we develop a new measure, the solidarity shift, to capture the prevalence of victims in policy narratives; we find there are significant differences in the narrative strategies employed by advocates and opponents of sanctuary jurisdictions, with opponents’ narratives demonstrating more active responses to external events and a higher proportion of victims, relative to other characters. We also find that the killing of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco can be seen as a focusing event because of the narrative actions of anti-sanctuary city advocates and their reliance on the solidarity shift, which resulted in significant changes to anti-sanctuary city narrative strategies.

Reflecting on Violent Ruptures and Loss in Qualitative Research: A Poetic Inquiry

Presenting poetic approaches to qualitative inquiry, two immigrant educational researchers from different minoritized communities explore their loss of research participants due to increased state-enforced violence in the context of recent immigration policies (e.g., increased presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in immigrant communities and anti-Muslim rhetoric) through poetic inquiry. Presenting the processes and products of engaging with participant loss through poetry, the authors highlight a theoretical and methodological approach to qualitative inquiry, which works toward building intimacies among women of color feminist educational researchers. On the one hand, this work aims to develop qualitative methodologies that seek to reduce harm and violence and foster understanding among different communities of researchers and their participants. On the other hand, it seeks to illustrate how poetic approaches to qualitative research can be used as a reflexive tool to explore the hidden socio-emotional components of the educational research process.

The House Is on Fire but We Kept the Burglars Out: Racial Apathy and White Ignorance in Pandemic-Era Immigration Detention

Past research shows that crises reveal the sensitive spots of established ideologies and practices, thereby providing opportunities for social change. We investigated immigration control amid the pandemic crisis, focusing on potential openings for both challengers and proponents of immigration detention. We asked: How have these groups responded to the pandemic crisis? Have they called for transformative change? We analyzed an original data set of primary content derived from immigrant advocates and stakeholders of the immigration detention industry. We found as the pandemic ravaged the world, it did not appear to result in significant cracks in the industry, as evidenced by the consistency of narratives dating back to pre-pandemic times. The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) criticisms of inhumane conditions in immigration detention resembled those from its pre-pandemic advocacy. Private prison companies, including CoreCivic and GEO Group, emphasized their roles as ordinary businesses rather than detention managers during the pandemic, just as they had before the crisis. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), however, manufactured an alternative storyline, emphasizing “COVID fraud” as the real threat to the “Homeland.” Although it did not call for radical change, it radically shifted its rhetoric in response to the pandemic. We discuss how these organizations’ indifference towards structural racism contributes to racial apathy and how the obliviousness and irresponsibility of industry stakeholders resembles white ignorance.

ICE Offices and Immigration Courts: Accompaniment in Zones of Illegality

In this article, I examine two sites of the contemporary illegality industry in the United States: the ICE Field Office and the Immigration Court. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic engagement, including accompaniment and observations in a regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office and an Executive Office of Immigration Reform (EOIR) Court, I trace how human interactions and social relations in each of these bureaucratic sites structure and reinforce conditions of precarity, insecurity, and marginality among undocumented and asylum seeking people in the United States. In both sites, the enforcement power of the state is visible through the configurations of bureaucratic processes and the structures of interactions between migrants and federal government officials. Examining these two sites from the vantage point of engaged ethnography, I illustrate how routine, bureaucratic encounters (re)produce illegality and exclusion by enacting violence against migrants through the powers of surveillance and administrative monitoring, and the threat of deportation and family separation. I also reflect on the political potential that emerges through activist anthropology and accompaniment with migrants in sites of state violence.

Shut Away

Shut Away is a window into a less-discussed immigration story in the United States. At present there are around fifty undocumented immigrants living in houses of worship after receiving deportation orders. It is the strategy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to avoid raiding these “sensitive locations,” allowing them to provide their occupants with insulation from the possibility of deportation. This act of taking sanctuary comes at a significant cost as the individual does not leave the property upon entering. Comprised of still photographs, video portraits and oral histories, Shut Away seeks a more nuanced account of life in sanctuary beyond the common depiction of victimhood. This paper will analyze the foundation, creation and context of the project. It begins with the historical and political background of the topic and the participants, then analyzes the methodology of the social and creative approach to the work The paper ends with a contextualization of the project within the documentary field and a reflection on the traditions of photography in which the work falls.

Shut Away

Shut Away is a window into a less-discussed immigration story in the United States. At present there are around fifty undocumented immigrants living in houses of worship after receiving deportation orders. It is the strategy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to avoid raiding these “sensitive locations,” allowing them to provide their occupants with insulation from the possibility of deportation. This act of taking sanctuary comes at a significant cost as the individual does not leave the property upon entering. Comprised of still photographs, video portraits and oral histories, Shut Away seeks a more nuanced account of life in sanctuary beyond the common depiction of victimhood. This paper will analyze the foundation, creation and context of the project. It begins with the historical and political background of the topic and the participants, then analyzes the methodology of the social and creative approach to the work The paper ends with a contextualization of the project within the documentary field and a reflection on the traditions of photography in which the work falls.

Social distance forever? Or, What is a Horizon for ‘Being near, Together with Others’?

In light of COVID-19 infection control measures, which establish a minimum distance of 6 feet between bodies, many have emphasised the need to maintain social closeness despite physical distance. This Position Piece considers the flip side of this concern: in key spaces that structure social interactions in the US today, physical closeness does not equal social closeness. ‘This country is like a prison,’ one of my interlocutors told me, pointing to carceral histories of social distancing that predateCOVID-19. Moreover, in the co-constituted spaces of criminalisation and justice, punishment and care, distance and proximity, and carceral freedom, the physical closeness of people that couldhave registered as social closeness is precluded, culminating in deadly disregard. Drawing on my medical training and on fieldwork documentation of medical harms in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention apparatus, I consider how non-responsiveness spreads within and beyond institutions of immigration enforcement. I suggest that medical providers are implicated in what I call ‘contagious containment’—that is, the impulse to distance oneself from harmful realities in which one’s clinical practice is complicit. This distancing reinforces the idea of humanity being a scarce resource, especially when the racialised stratification of economic and political resources is preserved in and through institutions like ICE detention. Contagious containment offers the fantasy of separating one’s clinical work from the apparatus of harming and, so long as such reservoirs of life-threatening disregard remain, such contagion can (and does) spread.