The Process is Extralegal Punishment: Refugee Desettlement via Deportation

• In Event: Abolish ICE! Migration and Detention under Trump 2.0

Abstract

One year after the Trump administration 2.0 began, over 70,000 migrants are being held in ICE detention, nearly double the amount from a year prior, and the US has enforced over 2 million removals and “self-deportations.” While community self-defense groups have learned about ICE tactics to try and stop deportations from occurring, less is known about what happens after people are kidnapped from the street or transferred via prison. To illuminate one example of a community caught in the expanding crimmigration dragnet, through analyzing ethnographic work and interviews, I outline the pathways of Cambodian American refugee deportees from initial arrival in Cambodia to forming a new life post-banishment from the US. Through theorizing what I call desettlement, I argue that deportation of refugees not only works to “undo” the purported purpose of refugee resettlement but also how post-deportation life for criminalized refugees in Cambodia is structured by ongoing imperial relations (Gowayed 2022). Following this case study, I then turn to our current environment in the US in which calls to “Abolish ICE” are becoming normalized, and argue that this moment provides opportunities for organizers and scholars to make more connections between criminality and xenophobia, and between the deportation machine and the prison industrial complex (PIC) as a whole. Building on my case study and on early ethnographic reflections from community-based anti-ICE work in Los Angeles, I discuss how migrant justice struggles that are grounded in an abolitionist politic allows us to understand the connections between ICE agents and local police and those between former state and federal prisons and ICE detention centers, to building towards a world without border imperialism.

Author

• Michael Nishimura, University of California, Santa Barbara