Abstract
Devolution—the process by which the federal government delegates its immigration enforcement responsibilities to local police—is arguably the most distinctive feature of the contemporary deportation regime. As the distinction between local police departments (PD) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) blurs, deportation is transformed from a federal project to a local preoccupation. If a prior generation of immigrants tacitly understood that so long as your clandestine entry was not detected, the risk of deportation ended at the border, the present generation understands that deportability is a local and daily risk. Amada Armenta’s gripping ethnography addresses local law enforcement’s collaboration with immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee, opening a window into the poorly understood processes by which local police act as proxies for ICE and how, in their everyday police work, officers participate in the racialization and criminalization of undocumented immigrants.
The scope of Armenta’s ethnography offers the reader a wide view of the deportation pipeline. She integrates observations and interviews with the deputies of the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office (DCSO) who perform immigration screenings; ride-alongs with the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) who serve as the initial point of entry to the deportation pipeline for immigrant residents; and immigrant residents who articulate their sense of violation for being racially profiled and deported for minor violations. Though officers may exhibit good intentions and go to lengths to do their job humanely and respectfully—even going so far as to establish community relations programming (see her discussion of the El Protector program profiled in Chapter 4)—the outcome remains the same: dragnet-style policing drives up deportations and drives down cooperation and trust between immigrants and local police.
As Armenta makes clear in a historical overview, local municipalities have long been involved in immigration policymaking and enforcement, though federal preemption steadily became the norm over time. More recently, however, the line between the federal and local enforcement practices has blurred. Though the statutory authority for these collaborative programs was established in 1996, the widespread exercise of this authority was not undertaken until after 9/11 and the subsequent association of immigration with terrorism. A flurry of immigration law making and local enforcement followed. In Nashville, battles were waged (and lost) over English-only laws, driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, and, at the heart of the book, the implementation of the 287(g) program, which deputizes the DCSO to conduct in-person screenings of immigrant detainees during booking and to transfer them to ICE custody if they are found to be out of status. The driver’s license issue became the linchpin of the local deportation regime. When immigrant residents were denied the ability to renew their licenses after the imposition of a social security number requirement, they immediately became vulnerable to citation and, if they could not prove their identity, arrest and deportation.
A crystal-clear example of the “crimmigration” trend, Armenta demonstrates the way that the investigatory stop—a key tool in a broader proactive policing approach—capitalizes on undocumented drivers’ inability to renew their licenses and amplifies the scope of 287(g). Emphasizing “contacts” with community members, proactive policing incentivizes officers to “push the stop” or leverage the occasion of a minor violation to interrogate suspicious people in their hunt for drugs, weapons, and information. Reflecting Latino undocumented drivers’ unique vulnerability to arrest (for driving without a license or valid identification) during an investigatory stop, Latino drivers who were stopped were arrested 29 percent of the time compared to only 8 percent of all traffic stops in 2007 (p. 83). Indeed where local immigration enforcement initiatives are adopted, we find an increase in the racial profiling of immigrant residents and the erosion of trust between police and Latinos.
Armenta recounts one such episode with the story of Juana Villegas who was stopped for “driving carelessly” in 2008. When she was unable to produce identification beyond the Mexican consulate issued matrícula, she was arrested, booked, screened by a 287(g) Sheriff’s Deputy and entered into deportation proceedings. At the time of her arrest, Villegas was eight and a half months pregnant and driving with her three US-born children in the car. After a heart-wrenching separation from her children, Villegas went into labor while in detention. Responding to public pressure, an immigration judge issued a cancellation of her removal order, and Villegas eventually secured a U-Visa (a special visa awarded to victims of crime) and six-figure settlement. Villegas’s ordeal is the exception that proves the rule. Undocumented immigrants who were stopped, arrested, and booked were almost uniformly entered into deportation proceedings without regard for their conviction status, the severity of the crime, nor any enforcement priorities outlined by ICE. Despite police officials’ public pronouncements to the contrary, 287(g) does not sanction immigrants who are criminals; it punishes those who are removable.
While officers undeniably rely on race when deciding whom to stop, Armenta stresses throughout the book that the institution breathes new life into the investigatory stop, not the individual officer. How do the presumably well-meaning, polite, and respectful officers who Armenta observes leave drivers feeling profiled and resentful? The answer lies not in the intentions of officers, but in institutionalized practices like the investigatory stop that create a theater for implicit bias and stereotyping. In a compelling table, Armenta shows that the number of deportations fluctuates a great deal as the DCSO implements and then abandons different federal–local programs (p. 145). The variation is not explained by officers’ attitudes, but by the protocols and practices of these different programs, ranging from 287(g) to the more recent Secure Communities and Prioritized Enforcement Program.
Armenta’s ethnographic skills pair beautifully with her clear prose, which contributes a sense of momentum and urgency to the text. Indeed, the book is a page-turner: a testament to the quality of her fieldwork and clarity of her analysis. She demonstrates a methodological savvy in what she shares with officers, and her analysis maintains a judicious empathy for her subjects. I cannot recall, for example, the last time I was brought to tears reading an academic text. Armenta describes one haunting story of a domestic violence call in which a young girl called the police about her two parents during a conflict, lied about her father’s use of a weapon to compel officers to respond, and finally witnessed her mother’s refusal to press charges. The scene closes with the officers escorting the allegedly abusive father outside while Armenta hugs the child who reported the violence. She alternately cultivates an intellectual distance and intimacy in a complex ethnographic terrain shared by the powerful and marginalized alike.
As with all books, Armenta’s, too, has its limits. It is not, for example, entirely clear what difference Nashville as a new immigrant destination makes to the analysis. Is the adoption of 287(g) driven by an influx of immigrants or by conservative political elites? If the latter, as some studies suggest, would it make any difference whether the immigrant community in a particular place was generations old or relatively new? I think the text also raises questions about how immigrant communities respond collectively and individually to the local police who engage in federal immigration enforcement. The text elucidates much about the inner working of the local immigration control apparatus, but somewhat less about immigrant residents’ responses to it. And while the gendered experience of enforcement is clearly visible in the data, its presence in her theoretical analysis remains latent.
These limits notwithstanding, this stellar volume cements Armenta’s status as an expert ethnographer working at the intersection of the sociology of critical criminology, law and society, and immigration. Academics and non-academics, graduate and undergraduate students alike will find in this text a readable and eminently troubling portrait of immigrant life in the deportation nation, a story deftly told through the clear-eyed and empathetic vision of one of the field’s rising stars.