Trump, Deportation. Resistance and the Vindictive State

• In Event: The Deportation Regime in the Trump 2.0 Presidency

Abstract

As the Trump administration pursues its policies of ethnic cleansing and turning the bourgeois democratic state into the disciplinary arm of an oligarchic bloc bent on terrorizing the U.S. population into abject submission to a neo-fascist imagination vindictiveness is a major characteristic of the state’s new and continuing practices. In this critical criminological presentation based on field work related to immigration removal hearings and migrant street protests I address two important features of this new authoritarian and vindictive era: (i) the combined methods used by the state and its agents to inflict maximum social harm on migrant subjects and (ii) the range of cultural and socio-political resistances that develop to challenge these processes of ruling-class domination and militarized social control. I conclude that it is out of the experience of this conflict that a new criminological imagination must emerge to challenge a dystopic imaginary of racialized purity, class obedience and ideological conformity that results from a failure to address the roots this “age of anger.”

Author

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