Book post: What the Threat of Federal ICE Raids Can Tell Us About State and Local Immigration Policy
As I wrote this blog post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were preparing to launch raids targeting undocumented immigrant families with final deportation orders in major US cities. While widespread sweeps have yet to materialize, mayors—spurred on by thousands of activists and protesters—loudly pledged to support immigrant residents, highlighting their community membership, blocking ICE access to local law enforcement resources, and increasing city-controlled immigrant assistance. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed proclaimed, “If you want to come after them, you’re going to have to come through us,” while Mayor Keisha Bottoms of Atlanta said, “We’ve closed our city detention centers to ICE because we don’t want to be complicit in family separation.” In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared, “Chicago is and will always be a welcoming city that will never tolerate ICE tearing our families apart” as she banned ICE from accessing police databases and increased the city’s Legal Protection Fund for immigrants facing deportation.
The mayors’ response to these raids lays bare aspects of today’s immigration federalism, or the role of states and localities in making and implementing immigration law and policy. Observers have long assumed that federal immigration policy sets uniform conditions for immigrants across the country. Since the late nineteenth century, the federal government has consolidated its authority over immigration and developed bureaucratic, technological, and legal apparatus to enforce this control. Nonetheless, as I show in my new book Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law, some of the fiercest battles over immigration and membership in the US are playing out at the state and local level.
States and localities are rushing to legislate on immigration during a time of remarkably restrictive national-level immigration policy. The scores of resulting subnational immigration measures contribute to a “multi-jurisdictional patchwork” of socio-legal contexts. As states and cities weigh in on immigration, they seek to ratchet up the threat from federal immigration enforcement or to mitigate it, as big-city mayors have been doing now in response to impending raids. These immigration measures—both restrictive and accommodating—deeply penetrate the lives of undocumented residents and their families.
What are the impacts of subnational immigration legislation for targeted immigrants? Emerging research counters dominant depictions of undocumented immigrants being pushed underground, their perception of threat so strong that they avoid public life altogether. In this “living in the shadows” trope, immigrants are stripped of membership, passively stowed away in their homes. But these broad-brush portrayals are not nearly a full representation of everyday undocumented life, even in restrictive destinations. This rendering better reflects initial reactions to new clampdowns, like the raids ICE recently threatened to launch. If undocumented residents are pushed to hide, it is not for long. After the shock wears off and rumors quiet down, people necessarily return to their routines.
As they do so, undocumented residents adapt everyday activities to the realities of their immediate receiving locales. Legal Passing centers on undocumented Mexicans, showing that as restrictive destinations bolster federal immigration enforcement, they create conditions for immigrants to subvert the public gaze and avoid government systems in everyday life. These immigrants adopt strategic behaviors, consume and display particular material things, and cultivate alternative outlooks as they attempt to erase presumed markers of “illegality,” or traits associated with their race and ethnicity, national origins, and class. In my book, for example, I interview a landscaper who wears khakis and a dress shirt on his commute home, substituting his dirty landscaping uniform for the white-collar dress standard. Sustained over time and under pressure, these acts can result in transformative alterations that forcibly deepen socio-cultural assimilation. There is an irony in these coerced shifts: decades of research show that the best way to foster undocumented immigrants’ integration is to provide attainable permanent legal status, not to restrict everyday life.
Legal Passing also demonstrates that accommodating destinations mitigate some of the harsh consequences of federal enforcement. Sanctuary jurisdictions—states, counties, and municipalities that bar government officials and police departments from engaging in immigration enforcement—are not a panacea for complicated tensions between communities of color and local law enforcement. Nonetheless, they do provide a measure of protection to undocumented residents. Moreover, as many subnational accommodations extend rights and benefits to all immigrants, they foster interactions between undocumented residents and local government, advocacy and non-profit organizations, and religious and community institutions. Over time, these relationships bolster immigrants’ sense of place-based membership, contributing to what scholars call a “right to the city” and the possibility of greater equality of outcomes across entire communities.
These findings have important policy implications. As the most immediate face of government, cities and states face a critical decision today: to fuel the flames of deportation threat or to help protect immigrants’ rights and foster their membership in ways that can have broad, positive effects. A next step is for elected local officials and citizens alike to support and amplify immigrants’ political and community engagement, following their lead on reimagining place-based inclusion.
About the author
Angela S. García is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her research centers on international migration, law and society, and urban sociology. García’s book, Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law (University of California Press 2019)compares the effects of restrictive and accommodating state and local-level immigration laws on the everyday lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her current research includes a study that theorizes time, waiting, and the state from the perspective of undocumented immigrants who would have been eligible for Deferred Action for the Parents of Americans (DAPA), and a collaborative project on Chicago’s municipal ID program, the first to unfold under the Trump administration. García received her PhD in Sociology and her master’s in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego.