Eres Ilegal o Que? Mexican American Police Officers' Voices on Migration Policy

• In Event: 225 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Paper Session. Latino/a Crimmigration Politics

Abstract

This article examines how federal funded migration programs provide police officers with a gate-keeping arm to screen, control, and sift Latina/o immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border. Drawing on the institutional ethnography method, we investigate the ways in which local police departments operate inside out to exercise control and impose social order on predominately immigrant communities. In doing so, we describe how the Criminal Alien Program, the Section 287g, and Secure Communities programs enable border police officers to employ rhetorical threats of deportation as a quick problem-solving tool to make sure social actors abide to the social conditions set by the law enforcement authority. We argue that immigrants learn to fear and mistrust police by keeping silence and accommodating themselves to the material reality of deportations. Race and symbolic violence models are used to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the institutional ideologies that facilitate police abusive practices.

Authors

• Eric Gamino, California State University, Northridge

• Juan José Bustamante, University of Arkansas