Protecting Immigrants and Punishing Gangs: Crafting the crimmigration police in Chicago’s sanctuary city regime

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 5. Effects of Race & Place on Policing Policy and Practice

Abstract

According to the Welcoming City Ordinance (2006), Chicago is a sanctuary city that restricts the cooperation between law and immigration enforcement agencies. But almost six years after the ordinance, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continue working together by targeting alleged gang members through both criminal policing and immigration control. Why does the CPD-ICE entanglement continue in what it is supposed to be a sanctuary city like Chicago? Drawing on two years of in-depth interviews and archival research, I argue that Chicago's sanctuary city regime and what I call crimmigration police (the CPD-ICE entanglement) are not contradictory but complementary forces in the state's historical prosecution of gangs in the city. Moreover, this piece argues that local politics of sanctuary city institutionalizes a crimmigration police apparatus under the figure of punitive exceptionalism; an 'extraordinary' suspension of the general restriction of the CPD-ICE cooperation to police immigrants when the involved defendant is classified as a gang member. This research further finds that the crimmigration police operates based on a reciprocal form of cooperation; CPD is directly involved in immigration enforcement of gangs while ICE is implicated in local crime control of these marginalized groups. Finally, the paper claims to (1) expand theories of crimmigration to emergent transpositions of law and immigration enforcement's surveillance on the ground, and (2) enrich scholarship of immigration policing and gang enforcement through the crimmigration police and its inner linkages between crime, immigration, gang control.

Author

• Enrique Alvear, University of Illinois at Chicago