Constructing the Visual Regime of Deportation: Logistics, Spectacle, and Normalization of Violence

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 9) Migration, Citizenship, and Displacement

Abstract

Deportation has consolidated its status as a central mechanism of state power in the contemporary United States. While formally framed as an administrative procedure, deportation operates within broader structures of racialization, criminalization, and legal exclusion. Existing scholarship has documented how immigration law produces “legal violence” (Cecilia Menjívar & Leisy Abrego 2012) and how the convergence of criminal and immigration law, “crimmigration” (Juliet Stumpf 2006), reconfigures migrants as punishable subjects. Yet less attention has been paid to how deportation is rendered publicly intelligible through visual media and how such representations normalize coercive state practices. This paper examines how leading U.S. media outlets construct what we call a visual regime of deportation: a patterned system of representation through which deportation is staged as administratively necessary, securitized, and morally justified. Drawing on 41 photographs published in 2025 by The New York Times, CNN, and the Miami Herald, this study's main question is, how do mainstream U.S. media visually articulate deportation in ways that transform legal exclusion into normalized and politically acceptable state violence?

Author

• Kashmaya Andreas Andreas Rincon, University of Florida