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Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Who Polices Immigration? -- 2. Setting Up the Local Deportation Regime -- 3. Being Proactive: On the Streets in Southeast Nashville -- 4. Seeing and Not Seeing Immigration: Immigrant Outreach in an Era of Proactive Policing -- 5. Inside the Jail: Processing Immigrants for Removal -- 6. Punishing Illegality -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Fieldwork FAQs -- Notes -- References -- Index

Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging.

Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging.

Deporting "criminal aliens" has become the highest priority in American immigration enforcement. Today, most deportations are achieved through the "crimmigration" system, a term that describes the convergence of the criminal justice and immigration enforcement systems. Emerging research argues that U.S. immigration enforcement is a "racial project" that subordinates and racializes Latino residents in the United States. This article examines the role of local law enforcement agencies in the racialization process by focusing on the techniques and logics that drive law enforcement practices across two agencies, I argue that local law enforcement agents racialize Latinos by punishing illegality through their daily, and sometimes mundane, practices. Investigatory traffic stops put Latinos at disproportionate risk of arrest and citation, and processing at the local jail subjects unauthorized immigrants to deportation. Although a variety of local actors sustain the deportation system, most do not see themselves as active participants in immigrant removal and they explain their behavior through a colorblind ideology. This colorblind ideology obscures and naturalizes how organizational practices and laws converge to systematically criminalize and punish Latinos in the United States.

This article contributes to emerging literature documenting the devolution of immigration enforcement authority by focusing on the implementation of the 287(g) program in Davidson County, Tennessee. It outlines how deputized immigration officers do their work as well as the ways they come to think about their roles in the larger immigration bureaucracy. Immigration officers see themselves as objective administrators whose primary responsibilities are to identify and process immigrants for removal, but who are not responsible for their subsequent deportation. While immigration officers never waiver about their obligation to uphold the rule of law, alternate narratives emerge depending on how they feel about the immigrants they encounter. These frames range from pride at identifying "criminal aliens" to guilt for processing immigrants who had been arrested for very minor violations. Ultimately, this work shows deputized immigration officers act as extensions of the federal government rather than as independent agents.

This article draws on in-depth interviews and ethnography to examine unauthorized Mexican immigrants' perceptions of and experiences with police in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Most existing research focuses on immigrants' fears of deportation as the primary determinant of negative attitudes toward the police. We add to this body of work by arguing that police interactions serve as important moments of legal socialization that also contribute to undocumented immigrants' legal attitudes. Our findings reveal that undocumented immigrants express a great deal of ambivalence about American police, believing them to be both trustworthy and overly punitive. Ultimately, the ambivalence that undocumented immigrants feel about the police mirrors the tension between inclusion and exclusion that characterizes immigrant life in the United States.

AbstractAs the United States has expanded its immigration control strategies, police participation in immigration enforcement has increased in scope and intensity. Local law enforcement agencies contribute to immigration enforcement in three key ways: through the direct enforcement of immigration law, through cooperation with federal immigration authorities, and through the everyday policing of immigrant communities. These enforcement approaches have consequences for unauthorized immigrants, and for the agencies and officers tasked with providing them police services. This article reviews local law enforcement practices and argues that future research should move away from an exclusive examination of police policies towards immigrants, to consider how the policing of immigrants actually occurs on the ground. Moreover, we argue that as long as discretionary arrests funnel removable immigrants into the deportation system, some immigrant communities will perceive policing as fundamentally unfair and discriminatory.

Unauthorized migration has been an important issue for decades. Because much has changed about this type of migration in the past two decades, this review takes stock of recent scholarship. These studies reveal a new complexity in the unauthorized migration in the early twenty-first century. First, compared with the past, unauthorized migration is more diverse. Whether based on gender, age, or how people enter, there is considerable heterogeneity in the unauthorized migrant population. Second, nation-states approach the issue of unauthorized migration differently than in the past, a fact that has increased the size and prominence of the unauthorized population and is related to the emergence of scholarship emphasizing the social construction of immigrant legal status.