snakes in the bureaucratic grass

and why to focus on detention

“We don’t want illegal immigrants to live in fear,” one young woman recently told the New Yorker. “We just want them gone.”¹

The anti-immigrant hard right wants immigrants evacuated from the country. They don’t need or necessarily want the spectacles of violence we saw in Minneapolis or Chicago. Blackhawks choppering down onto apartment buildings and great coats tailing in the wind have turned passé — at least for now. But while the style with which the immigration agents are making arrests has changed in recent months, the pace of arrests has not.

There’s a lesson here: immigrant advocates seeking substantive change (and ultimately justice) can’t just push back against the Bovinos and the Noems; they also need to push against the system. And that system is often faceless and hard to target.

The metropolitan areas of Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio each had more arrests than in Minneapolis over the same period that included Metro Surge. In other words, ostentatious state violence is not essential to enacting the ultimate goal of mass deportation. Massive raids and urban surges are not necessary tools for the anti-immigrant regime. And now that communities have — valiantly, inspiringly — stood up and faced down masked thugs, enforcement is becoming more bureaucratized, more efficient.

A couple of examples…

USCIS officers — previously the most boring and unthreatening of immigration officers — are now able to make arrests and carry weapons. Immigration courts and offices are luring people into interviews, canceling green card applications and naturalization ceremonies, and ensnaring folks at almost any point of official contact.

One ruse involves USCIS referring cases to EOIR — basically ICE’s immigration “court” — as EOIR is more efficient at denying claims for protection. (Efficiency is relative, and isn’t a word typically associated with US immigration procedures.) Even in cases where someone has been granted a visa, and has been given a notice saying that it has been granted, but they have yet to receive it, ICE (in collaboration with USCIS) is using that window of deportability for defenestration.

I recently attended a couple EOIR hearings in Phoenix with Beth Strano, Executive Director of Borderlands Resource Initiative, who said of the immigration court system, “Never before has it been more of an administrative function and less of a court.” And it’s never been much of a court, either.

Families with young kids, including infants, single people dressed in their finest and at times abundantly bewildered by the arcane and aggressive machinations of the anti-immigration court, all crowded into a low-ceilinged courtroom. One man appeared on blurry video from detention. The judge plodded through more than 45 minutes of preliminary legalese and then started the hearings. At least one person had had their case referred to EOIR by USCIS: the supposedly non-enforcement side of the immigration regime directly cahooting with the we-just-want-them-gone branch.

Then there is the local enforcement angle. Not just the mere expansion of 287(g) agreements, which is worrying enough, (a nearly 1,000% increase in number of agreements in the past 16 months) but DHS announcing last fall that they would start paying bounties, establishing what is in effect a mercenary system to capture migrants: “Law enforcement agencies will be eligible for quarterly monetary performance awards based on the successful location of illegal aliens.” Around 15,000 local officers and deputies have been trained for task force work so far, which is more than the 12,000 new ICE agents that DHS claims it’s hired under Trump II. The immigrant snares are being laid everywhere.

Which is how they got Karla Saenz, who I wrote about for LOOKOUT. They arrested her at a standard check-in — and then tortured her in a camp in Eloy, Arizona.

Also in Arizona, the legislature passed a bill requiring all hospitals that accept medicaid to ask each new patient their immigration status. While the governor vetoed the bill, state legislatures across the country are pushing on the bounds of legality to see what might work, how else they can start rounding up immigrants. Most of this is being done without the major street standoffs, without the violent clashes and killings that so energizes the resistance. Take Beatriz, a Phoenix-area mother of three who got caught up as a collateral arrest when she was driving to work last November. She was almost twelve weeks pregnant at the time. The stress of her arrest prompted stomach pains, which became severe. Though ICE was telling her she wasn’t pregnant, she would soon have proof: she miscarried. Over five months later, she is still in detention, still separated from her three other children. I also wrote about Beatriz for LOOKOUT.

https://www.lookoutnews.org/ice-said-she-wasnt-pregnant-then-she-miscarried/

So what then? How to push back? If there’s not a face or a hyper-publicized blitz of enforcement, what do people push back against? That’s in large part what my forthcoming book is about. I make the case that a vulnerable — and essential — piece of the immigration enforcement regime is the detention system.

Focusing on stopping expansion and shutting down currently operating immigration camps is key. That work needs to be done at every level, including the state (see a recent win in New Mexico) and, even more importantly, locally.

Not only are immigration camps sites of profound moral harm and moral injury, and not only are they a pinch point, but the way to close them is by building up community, by building and then wielding community power. And the benefits of that work go well beyond the camp.

I’m reading again

I’m reading books not just to juice them into digestible drips for my own research, but to explore and simply enjoy — and it’s been luxurious.

These three have been especially pleasurable, exemplifying for me what different genres can do: the sweeping sci-fi novel, the hyper-literary auto-fiction, and the exploratory essay.

I picked up Lerner’s The Topeka School in preparation to read his new novel. I’ve read his poetry and his earlier novels, and liked them a lot, but Topeka School really impressed.

There is something sometimes forced and too beautiful about some of Lerner’s scenes — bordering a preciousness — but his associative logic, gathering of perspectives, and capturing of a time and milieu (mostly suburban America circa mid ‘90s) was, at times, enrapturing. The book recalled some of my favorite Javier Marías: the use of refrains, self-reference, and collapsing two scenes set in different times into a single moment. I finished the last page of The Topeka School over a burrito at a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix. I closed my eyes, green chile fumes in the air, and it took me a while to gather myself back into a whole.

1. The woman from the opening quote is a so-called groypette, a young openly hateful and anti-Semitic fascist and follower of Nick Fuentes.