“Arrested Motion: ‘Operation Return to Sender’ and the Politics of (Im)mobility for Maya Migrants in the United States”

• In Event: Precarious Passages: The Insecurity of Immigration Control in the Americas

Abstract

In the dawn hours of a spring morning in 2007, U.S. federal immigration agents swept into an immigrant suburb of Marin County, California, a primary receiving hub for indigenous Mexican migrants. The raids that ensued formed part of a national law enforcement effort – code-named “Operation Return to Sender” – launched by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security. While many California cities have long offered local sanctuary policies that protect the rights of undocumented immigrants, such provisions may be superseded by federal law enforcement efforts. In this paper, I draw upon the experiences of Maya migrants from Yucatán, Mexico in the San Francisco Bay Area to show how the threat of “collateral” arrest produces a particular politics of (im)mobility for indigenous migrants. Using the ethnographic frame of this federal raid, I argue that such an analysis of anticipated surveillance best illuminates how migrant “illegality” is sustained as an embodied sociopolitical condition.

Author

• Deanna E Barenboim, Sarah Lawrence College