Beyond the Oklahoma Standard: How Anti-Immigration Politics Constructs Legal Violence and Shapes Latino Consciousness

• In Event: Latinx Immigrant Detention, Deportation, and the Carceral State

Abstract

Immigration enforcement has increasingly devolved to state-level governance, reshaping how legal violence is produced and experienced. Building on crimmigration scholarship examining federal regimes (Menjívar & Abrego 2012; Armenta 2017; Garcia 2017), this study documents how Republican-supermajority states construct legal violence in the Trump 2.0 era of decentralized immigration control and how this shapes Latino legal consciousness.
Oklahoma exemplifies this shift. Despite forming a Bipartisan Latino Caucus in 2021 for its 471,000 Latino residents, the state enacted HB 4156, criminalizing unauthorized presence, proposed 23 bills in 2025 and 31 in 2026, passed SB 20 targeting commercial drivers, and expanded 287(g) agreements deputizing local police. Drawing on 60 interviews with Latino residents across generational statuses, ethnographic observations, and analysis of 60 bills (2023-2026), I employ flexible coding within legal violence and legal consciousness frameworks. Seven codes emerged: policy awareness, fear/anxiety, racialization, internalized shame, structural barriers, family dynamics, and internal rationalization.
Preliminary findings reveal that racialization operates independently of legal status. When HB 4156 authorizes arrest based on "suspicion," appearance overrides documentation, even U.S.-born youth constrain their behavior to protect undocumented family members. This research contributes to three debates: documenting state-level legal violence construction mechanisms beyond federal enforcement, demonstrating that legal consciousness forms through racialization regardless of documentation status, and revealing how immigration federalism creates compounded pressure as Republican-controlled states align with federal anti-immigration rhetoric. These findings reveal how decentralized immigration control operates in conservative states, highlighting the experiences of Latinos in unexpected migrant destinations where such practices are quietly normalized.

Author

• Wendy K Dedmond, University of Oklahoma