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

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

Despite a wide body of research disproving stereotypes that link immigration with crime, the objective of deporting immigrants with criminal records has undergirded increasingly punitive immigration policy in the United States over the past thirty years. This makes the criminal justice system central in the succession of events that funnel many immigrants toward deportation. We use the concept of a pipeline to illustrate the ways that overlapping systems of criminal and immigration law produce subjects for detention and deportation. The pipeline is constituted by the variety of institutional policies and procedures that funnel criminalized immigrants toward detention and removal—policies and procedures directly affected by a punitive turn in U.S. policymaking that began in the 1980s . The result is a multifaceted pathway with various points of entry and progression—enhancing systemic power to exclude while also creating diverse possibilities for resistance, seized by institutional actors and affected communities alike. Papers in this panel examine the workings and impacts of specific processes of the “criminalization-to-deportation pipeline.”

Sub Unit

• Area X. Critical Criminology / 76. Critical Perspectives in Criminology

Individual Presentations

• Criminal Convictions, Deportation, and Inequality: A Case Study of the Secure Communities Program - Edwin Grimsley, Baruch College, CUNY; Lidia Vasquez, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

• The Institutional Hearing Program and the Incarceration-to-Deportation Pipeline - Lorena Avila Jaimes, Rutgers University - Newark; Sarah Tosh, Rutgers University - Camden

• Fear and Loathing in the Homeland Security State: A Bourdieusian account for the expansion of the ICE and its effect on immigration enforcement - Nicholas Rodrigo, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Policing the Border(s): The ICE machine, social bulimia and the deportation pipeline in New York City - David Brotherton, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Sarah Tosh, Rutgers University - Camden

Chair

• Sarah Tosh, Rutgers University - Camden

Discussant

• Felicia Arriaga, Baruch College, CUNY