Violent Encounters with Federal Immigration Agents

• In Event: Latina/o Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 3: Violence, Immigration, and State Power

Abstract

Federal immigration enforcement agents are increasingly patrolling in the U.S. interior. This is partly associated with the ICE raids across the country and with operations used to quell protests. In this study, I built a dataset based on data from Mapping Police Violence and supplemented the data with more cases, legal documents, and media sources, to study the killings by on- and off-duty federal immigration agents. This dataset supports both quantitative and qualitative analyses of deadly encounters involving federal immigration agents from 2013 to June 2024. I am currently working on updating the data to the current time. Preliminary results show a) racial disparities in the killing of Latina/os, b) fatal encounters with federal immigration agents are occurring during stops not associated with border enforcement, and c) off-duty killings by federal immigration agents are associated with vigilantism and domestic violence. I conclude with a discussion on how the U.S.-Mexico border has historically been a laboratory for punitive policing practices that are extending throughout the nation. Moreover, while not all agents are violent, given the brutality of killings by off-duty federal immigration agents, including a border patrol supervisor sentenced for the serial murder of four women, and another case of another border patrol supervisor who stabbed his girlfriend and one-year-old son, signals concerns on the extension of the militarization sub-culture in federal immigration enforcement that is extending to communities.

Author

• Maria Cristina Morales, University of Texas at El Paso