Fear and Loathing in the Homeland Security State: A Bourdieusian account for the expansion of the ICE and its effect on immigration enforcement

• In Event: The Criminalization-to-Deportation Pipeline: Processes of Crimmigration Enforcement and Deportation

Abstract

Since its establishment in 2003, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seen a massive expansion in its funding and operative mandate. In this time, ICE has played a central role in the unfurling of the immigration enforcement infrastructure through its central role in a Bourdieusian “field of security” within the US. This field of security has come about through the demand for new areas of expertise within fields of insecurity management and the pluralization of law enforcement actions since 9/11. The emergence of overlapping security fields has seen the inclusion and exclusion of new actors competing for positions of authority, with ICE and its attendant bureaucracies constantly vying for forms of symbolic capital to secure positions in security governance. The effects of this have been to view sanctuary cities like New York City as areas which need specific intervention, lending further power to the agency’s supposed preeminence in the field of national security. Through archival research and semi-structured interviews this paper will delineate how ICE uses its position within the burgeoning homeland security field to infiltrate and lay claim to local law enforcement initiatives in order to expand and shape enforcement procedures in cities otherwise reticent to collaborate.

Author

• Nicholas Rodrigo, The Graduate Center, City University of New York