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

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 community responses and strategies of resistance to the workings of the “criminalization-to-deportation pipeline.”

Sub Unit

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

Individual Presentations

• Understanding the deportation pipeline: families’ Narratives on law enforcement - Yajaira Ceciliano-Navarro, University of Houston-Downtown

• “Before we can talk about the polimigra, we have to talk about racism and white supremacy” - Felicia Arriaga, Baruch College, CUNY

• The Deportation Regime in the “Sanctuary City:” A Nexus of Reformist Immigration Justice Aims and Carceral Conditions in New York City - Brian Mercado, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

• “Crimmigration” Advisal in Public Defense Offices: An Exploration of Major Immigrant-Receiving Cities in the United States - Sarah Tosh, Rutgers University - Camden; Lorena Avila Jaimes, Rutgers University - Newark

Chair

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

Discussant

• David Brotherton, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY