Racialized Carceral Federalism: Texas’ SB 8, Sheriff Incentives, and the Reconfiguration of Illegality

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 27. Immigration and the criminal-legal system

Abstract

This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary immigration enforcement reorganizes race, illegality, and belonging through subnational governance. While public and scholarly attention often centers on federal policy, I argue that states play a constitutive role in shaping the infrastructure of immigration control. I introduce the concept of racialized carceral federalism to describe a governance formation in which subnational states deploy fiscal resources and local carceral institutions to operationalize federal immigration priorities. Using Texas’ SB 8 and the Sheriff Immigration Law Enforcement Grant Program (SILEGP) as conceptual anchors, the paper theorizes state-level grantmaking and sheriff incentives as racial projects. Though formally race-neutral, these fiscal and administrative mechanisms reorganize resources and authority in ways that embed immigration enforcement within everyday criminal legal processes, such as patrol and jail booking. This diffusion of enforcement authority decentralizes deportability, making it an ambient condition of social life rather than a function confined to federal immigration agents or border spaces.

Drawing on scholarship on racial formation, legal violence, deportability, crimmigration, and carceral citizenship, the paper advances a conceptual intervention rather than an empirical case study. It argues that when immigration status is institutionalized as a criminal justice concern, illegality becomes fused with criminality, reshaping the moral and political boundaries of membership. By foregrounding fiscal governance and intergovernmental enforcement partnerships, this paper moves beyond federal-centric analyses and demonstrates how contemporary immigration regimes operate through decentralized, formally neutral administrative tools that reproduce racial hierarchy and reconfigure the racial state.

Author

• Eric Gamino, California State University-Northridge