Contesting Deportability: Racialized Enforcement and the Struggle for Black Immigrant Belonging

• In Event: Racialization and Immigration Enforcement

Abstract

Black immigrants constitute less than 6% of the undocumented population yet account for over 10% of immigrants in removal proceedings and 20% of deportations on criminal grounds. While crimmigration scholarship documents how convergence of criminal and immigration law expands state power, less is known about how those working most closely with Black immigrants understand the institutional processes producing disproportionate vulnerability. This paper examines how legal and advocacy professionals describe these mechanisms, contest enforcement through advocacy, and navigate political constraints when working with Black immigrant populations. Drawing on preliminary analysis of 25 interviews with immigration attorneys, public defenders, and advocates working nationally, I analyze how professionals interpret the crimmigration nexus, employ strategies to challenge racialized enforcement, and encounter structural barriers. I use deportable Blackness as an analytic framework to understand how anti-Black racism and immigration enforcement converge to construct Black immigrants as simultaneously criminal and deportable—regardless of legal status. Three key findings emerge. First, participants describe vulnerability as produced through discretionary decision-making across interconnected institutions—policing, prosecution, and ICE—that target Black immigrants regardless of legal compliance. Second, they emphasize systematic invisibility within broader immigrant rights movements, requiring autonomous Black immigrant organization-building while struggling for resources and recognition. Third, professionals articulate competing frameworks—some explicitly naming anti-Blackness as organizing enforcement, others emphasizing systemic critiques exceeding race-specific frames. This analysis contributes to crimmigration scholarship by revealing how the criminal-immigration nexus operates specifically for Black immigrants through institutional collaboration and coded policy exclusions. It also illuminates how racialized ideas of membership are constructed not only through enforcement but through the political economy of immigrant advocacy itself. The paper demonstrates how deportable Blackness operates through institutional mechanisms, political marginalization, and competing moral frameworks that legitimate racialized exclusion

Author

• Fadilat Olasupo, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor