The Post–Civil Rights Borderland

Arizona has played a historic role in national “law and order” policymaking and immigration politics. Today it has some of the highest levels of criminal arrest, prosecution, and sentencing for immigration offenses. Yet it is also home to one of the most dynamic border- and immigrant-rights movements in the country. This chapter explores linkages among civil rights, mass incarceration, and immigration enforcement to better explain the local political and economic context in which the Department of Homeland Security has diffused federal criminal enforcement priorities and institutionalized “prosecutorial” approaches to migration that aggressively punish while safeguarding “victims’ rights.”

Victims and Culprits

The criminal alien mandate requires that border agents direct enforcement resources toward high-priority targets, principally those with a criminal record. Rather than processing apprehended undocumented migrants according to explicit “racial” and “national” criteria, agents now distinguish between victims and criminals. Focusing on Border Patrol–migrant interactions, this chapter examines how enforcement priorities rooted in the Criminal Alien Program have transformed apprehension and deportation practices on the border.

Introduction

For many, the punitive turn in immigration stems from the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Although 9/11 linked immigration and national security, this link occurred more in the national imagination than in practice. The day-to-day operations of Border Patrol agents do not involve intercepting terrorists or chemical weapons, nor are border agents apprehending migrants from countries on the “state sponsors of terrorism” or “terrorist safe haven” lists. Despite the rhetorical conflation of immigration with terrorism and national security, what border enforcement looks like in practice is little more than domestic crime control extended to an immigration context. The introductory chapter recounts over a decade of historical and ethnographic research on this new blend of immigration and crime control that began well before the events of September 11.

The Citizen and the Criminal

New enforcement targets and deployment of more border patrol to Arizona-Sonora border communities has inadvertently involved agents more directly in local crime control. This is the flip side to the more familiar scenario of local police and sheriffs who carry out immigration enforcement. This chapter considers the overreach of enforcement priorities and what some refer to as “net widening” in predominantly Latino border communities where border residents, mostly Mexican American citizens and legal permanent residents, are routinely arrested, prosecuted, sentenced, and, in some cases, deported for violations of immigration law.

Protectors and Prosecutors

Implementing the Department of Homeland Security’s criminal enforcement priorities—even in a punitive state like Arizona—has not been automatic. In a border region dependent on cross-border flows of people, goods, and money, implementing new crime-centered enforcement priorities did not generate the widespread consensus expressed in Congress. On the contrary, the federal mandate evoked tensions among border agents, local law enforcement, immigrant advocates, and Mexican officials on the ground. This chapter examines how front-line agents’ relations to other players involved in immigration enforcement shaped the ways in which enforcement priorities took hold, with local actors serving as both protectors and prosecutors.

Beds and Biometrics

Prominent Arizona conservatives and, some would argue, liberal reformers helped spearhead law and order policies that exploded the U.S. prison population and created a crisis of prison overcrowding. This chapter argues that the scramble for prison beds was a major force behind the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), which Congress pushed as a way to purge noncitizens from jails and prisons in order to free up prison beds. CAP gave primacy to criminal enforcement targets and unleashed an onslaught of measures that restructured immigrant detention and deportation, spawned similar programs like “absconder” initiatives, “fugitive” operations, Security Communities, and immigrant prosecution programs like Operation Streamline—in other words, many of the punitive policies we associate with the criminalization of migration in the United States today. However, punitive policies are not necessarily a “backlash” against rights and protections that reformers fought for for over a century. Rather, they operate within post–civil rights “antidiscrimination” constitutional frameworks in ways that recognize rights for certain “victims,” while aggressively punishing and banishing those branded as criminal.

A New Enforcement Terrain

The concluding chapter reflects on the Department of Justice’s recent criminal justice reforms, and the Department of Homeland Security’s new Priority Enforcement Program, designed to target “felons, not families.” Evaluating border crossers and borderlanders on the basis of criminal history has created a new enforcement terrain and new forms of criminalization that differ from historic practices of illegalization. The concluding chapter reflects on this shifting enforcement arena and the global diffusion of criminal enforcement priorities under the so-called war on terror and considers the implications for migrant advocates and academics concerned with race and democracy.