Collective Amnesia: White Innocence and Ignorance in the Devolution of Immigration Enforcement

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 17. White Perceptions of Race/Ethnicity and Migration

Abstract

The devolution of federal immigration enforcement throughout the United States places the ability to implement new practices/policies/procedures into the hands of local law enforcement and local governments. For the latter, local governments initially approved the implementation of partnerships with federal authorities, and it is within that initiation process that racial threat is explicit as a motivator for local level immigration policy changes like the 287(g) program—a partnership that deputizes local sheriff personnel to implement federal immigration enforcement practices and procedures. These policy changes initiated almost 10 years ago have become normalized and gone unchallenged as part of legal and state violence (Menjivar and Abrego 2012) directed at Latinos and Latino immigrants alike in locales where 287(g) programs were adopted. These normalized practices and subsequent collective amnesia of the program’s impetus is bolstered by a dual process of the normalization of enforcement practices which became hidden overtime and competing priorities, which prevent community members from maintaining a sustained resistance against such implementation. Furthermore, this collective amnesia exhibited by whites and nonwhite community members alike, manifests itself through a combination of claims of white innocence (Ross 1990; Bonilla-Silva 1997), white ignorance (Mills 2007), the need for economic power, and relatively recently through white savior mentality (Hughey 2012).
First I describe the program in detail, focusing on the local level input from local law enforcement, county commissioners, and the general public that is a unique characteristic of this program. I then shift the focus to issue of accountability and transparency of the program’s existence over the past 10 years. And finally, I end with a discussion of the collective amnesia, which developed during the 10 year period and how renewed interest in the program’s implementation has come about in the wake of a new presidential administration.

Author

• Felicia Arriaga, Duke University