Freezing Out the “Undeserving” Immigrant: How Binary Narratives within Sanctuary Discourse Must Be Replaced with Substantive Steps to “Abolish ICE”

• In Event: Deporting Gotham’s “Bad Immigrant”: NYC's Criminal Deportation Pipeline and the Growing Movement of Resistance

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with community-based organization members, advocates, legal practitioners, and directly-impacted immigrants in New York City and its surrounding areas, I explore the arguments for and against regarding New York City as a sanctuary city in policy and practice. Ultimately, I argue that the mechanisms through which information becomes available to ICE despite sanctuary policies and practices, including through the linking of interoperable databases and collaborations between federal immigration enforcement agencies and local and state law enforcement actors, points to the fallacies of sanctuary when operating through state structures. In my critique of sanctuary through state structures, I interrogate how liberal conceptualizations of sanctuary jurisdictions from federal immigration enforcement are rooted in discourses that selectively mobilize protection to those deemed deserving of sanctuary while harnessing policing power against those deemed undeserving. The rights afforded to immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, are limited when sanctuary is afforded through discourses that selectively practice protection and policing—professing to offer protection for those people deemed deserving while mobilizing the deportation regime against the “undeserving.” This discourse implicitly creates a group of undeserving immigrants that not only are excluded from protection, but are framed as the very threats that necessitate, legitimize, and institutionalize criminal law and immigration enforcement. Ultimately, this model for sanctuary is flawed because it wields policing practices, operating through state structures that seek to solve issues created by the very same state. Based on these insights, I argue for the need to root our approaches to sanctuary in abolitionist political stances, moving away from “reformist reforms” toward “abolitionist steps.”

Author

• Brian Mercado, The Graduate Center, CUNY