Crimmigration Law and Legal Resistance in a New Era of the Deportation Regime

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

Abstract

After a campaign rife with stereotypes about immigrant criminality, the second Trump presidency has brought a myriad of rapid policy changes and high-profile detainments and deportations, with an emphasis on the removal of noncitizens who are supposedly dangerous. Yet despite sensationalistic rhetoric around the need to deport “criminals,” the expansion of detention and deportation has only served to further “widen the net” of who is impacted. Like many times in U.S. history, unfounded claims of immigrant criminality are used to broaden the breadth of punitive systems of social exclusion and control. Drawing from interviews conducted from 2024-2025 with lawyers and advocates in major immigrant-receiving cities around the United States, as well as earlier research on detention and deportation in New York and New Jersey, this paper details observed changes to “crimmigration” law and the responses of legal practitioners and advocates in a new era of authoritarian policy.

Authors

• Sarah Tosh, Rutgers University-Camden

• Lorena Avila, Villanova University