The Deportation Regime in the “Sanctuary City:” A Nexus of Reformist Immigration Justice Aims and Carceral Conditions in New York City

• In Event: The Criminalization-to-Deportation Pipeline: Community Responses, Advocacy, and Resistance

Abstract

Drawing from interviews with legal practitioners and community organizers based in New York City and its surrounding areas, supplemented by policy analysis, and informed by the efforts and analyses advanced by prison and police abolitionists operating under non-reformist reform frameworks, I analyze how reformist immigration justice pursuits, such as state-beholden sanctuary jurisdiction frameworks, lead to carceral outcomes for multiply marginalized and criminalized populations even as they produce material changes that benefit certain people with precarious legal statuses. I examine ways that campaigns relying on police in sanctuary cities and legal representation in immigration court can entrench, extend, and obscure carceral conditions and immigration enforcement in the City of New York. Based on these insights, I argue for the reorientation of ideas of protection away from the reformist rationales present in sanctuary jurisdiction models and toward abolitionist, non-reformist orientations of sanctuary.

Author

• Brian Mercado, The Graduate Center, City University of New York