Expanding Geographies of Deportability: How Immigration Enforcement at the Local Level Affects Undocumented and Mixed‐Status Families

• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12119
• Author: Carolina Valdivia

Expanding Geographies of Deportability: How

Immigration Enforcement at the Local Level Affects

Undocumented and Mixed-Status Families

CAROLINA VALDIVIA

This article examines the impact of policies and programs that have expanded immigration

enforcement from the federal to the local level. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over

sixty individuals who are members of undocumented or mixed-status families, I discuss how

these initiatives have extended the geography of deportability from traditional sites that focus

explicitly on immigration enforcement (e.g., the US–Mexico border) to more nontraditional

sites in the public sphere (e.g., driving under the influence checkpoints or grocery stores).

I demonstrate how this intensification of enforcement strains undocumented immigrants’

resources as well as their participation in school, work, and their communities.

I. INTRODUCTION

Driven by the federal government’s lack of action on immigration law, states and cities

across the United States have increasingly enacted a number of immigration policies that

seek to facilitate or restrict undocumented immigrants’ access to opportunities. In 2017

alone, legislators across the country considered passing a total of 206 immigration bills;

this marked a 110 percent increase from the previous year (National Conference of State

Legislatures 2018). These policies can be broadly categorized under the topics of educa-

tion, identification, employment, health, voting, and law enforcement. For example, in

2010, the state of Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070 and House Bill 2162, which in part

aimed to require law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of indi-

viduals during any lawful stop.

Scholars refer to the phenomenon of the increasing role of states and cities in enfor-

cing immigration law as “immigration federalism” (Huntington 2008; Motomura 2011).

Much of legal research on immigration federalism has centered on the question of what

role states and cities should play in creating and implementing immigration law. On the

one hand, some legal scholars argue in favor of state-level immigration policies, noting

that they have the potential to help integrate immigrants and address varying voter pref-

erences across states (Spiro 1994; Huntington 2008; Rodriguez 2008). On the other

hand, scholars warn that state and local efforts that shift immigration enforcement from

I thank the Law & Policy reviewers and editors for their insightful comments on previous drafts. Special thanks

go to those who have shared their stories with me.

Address correspondence to: Carolina Valdivia, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Email: valdiviaordorica@g.harvard.edu.

LAW & POLICY, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2019

©2018 The Author

Law & Policy ©2018 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12119

ISSN 0265-8240

federal to local authorities promote racial profiling against noncitizens (Motomura

1994; Wilshnie 2004; Olivas 2007). In an effort to more closely analyze the role of local

law enforcement officers in implementing federal immigration law, scholars have also

coined the term “multilayered patchwork of immigration enforcement” (Varsanyi 2010;

Varsanyi et al. 2012; Provine et al. 2016). This term refers to the “emerging, confusing,

and often contradictory geography of immigration enforcement in the United States”

(Varsanyi et al. 2012, 139).

With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Coleman 2007, 2012; Varsanyi et al. 2012), the lit-

erature on immigration federalism has paid less attention to how immigration law pro-

duces geographies of immigration enforcement. To be sure, legal geographers studying a

wide range of topics have sought to explain the relationship between the legal, the spa-

tial, and the social, underscoring the ways in which political, social, and physical sites

are constituted and reconstituted by the law (Blomley 1994; Bennett and Layard 2015;

Delaney 2015).

Situated within the literatures on legal geography and immigration federalism, this

article examines how “deportability”—that is, the threat of apprehension and subse-

quent deportation (De Genova 2002)—is mapped onto place. More specifically, I

explore how the intensification of immigration enforcement from the federal to the local

level directly and indirectly transforms what I conceptualize as the “geographies of

deportability”—the social, political, and physical sites produced by the law where immi-

gration enforcement is localized, thereby heightening undocumented immigrants’ vul-

nerability to deportation. I pay particular attention to sites that immigrants in San

Diego County, California, have come to associate with an increased risk of deportation

and the consequences that this has on their participation in work, school, and their com-

munities. To this end, this article makes the following contributions to the literature:

First, it moves beyond discussions centered on the role of states, in particular, by paying

closer attention to what is happening at the local level. This is crucial, since there is great

variation in how local authorities may use their discretion to implement immigration

law. Second, this study contributes to the growing discussion of how the expansion of

interior immigration enforcement at the local level affects the daily routines and mental

health of undocumented immigrants and their families. Third, unique to this study is its

use of ethnographic data from the people who are directly affected.

II. BACKGROUND: IMMIGRATION FEDERALISM AT THE LOCAL LEVEL

There is broad consensus in the literature that the Illegal Immigration Reform and

Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Personal Responsibility and Work

Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), both of which were enacted in 1996, set

the stage for states and cities to take action on immigration law (Chishti 2001; Varsanyi

2010; Filindra and Kovacs 2011; Coleman 2012; Varsanyi et al. 2012; Armenta 2017).

Amongst other things, PRWORA, for example, allowed states to set their own rules for

restricting benefit programs (e.g., Medi-Cal) based on immigration status.

Introduced under IIRIRA, the 287(g) program is among the first policies that

expanded immigration law enforcement from the federal to the local level. The program

enables state and local police officers to enforce immigration law. Deputized officers

who are members of law enforcement agencies that have chosen to participate in the 287

(g) program are encouraged to question individuals about their immigration status,

transfer noncitizens whom they encounter into the custody of US Immigration and Cus-

toms Enforcement (ICE), and more. As of this writing, seventy-five law enforcement

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104 LAW & POLICY January 2019