coleman - immigration geopolitics beyond mexico-us border

Immigration Geopolitics Beyond theMexico–US Border

Mathew ColemanDepartment of Geography, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA;

[email protected]

AbstractDespite the centrality of Mexico–US border policing to pre- and post-9/11 US immigrationgeopolitics, perhaps the most significant yet largely ignored immigration-related fallout of theso-called war on terrorism has been the extension of interior immigration policing practicesaway from the southwest border. As I outline in this paper, these interior spaces of immigra-tion geopolitics—nominally said to be about fighting terrorism, but in practice concerned withundocumented labor migration across the Mexico–US border—have not emerged accidentally.Rather, the recent criminalization of immigration law, the sequestering of immigration enforce-ment from court oversight and the enrollment of proxy immigration officers at sub-state scaleshave been actively pursued so as to make interior enforcement newly central to US immigrationgeopolitics. I argue here that these embryonic spaces of localized immigration geopolitics shednew light on the spatiality of US immigration governance, which has typically been thought of bygeographers as active predominantly at the territorial margins of the state. I conclude the paperwith some thoughts as to how geographers might rethink the what and where of contemporaryUS immigration geopolitics.

IntroductionAfter 9/11, US lawmakers and administration officials scrambled topresent undocumented migration as a possible national security threat.The reasoning, as Malkin (2002:8) echoed bluntly in her post-9/11 best-seller Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, andOther Foreign Menaces to Our Shores, was that undocumented mi-grants and terrorists make similarly surreptitious use of US borders:“The September 11 hijackers all came through the front door, but illegalimmigration . . . is the passageway of countless terrorist brethren”. Assuch, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, immigration law reform and bor-der enforcement were quickly positioned as frontline defenses againstterrorism, as they had following the 1993 World Trade Center and 1995Oklahoma City bombings. Although Canada’s immigration policies andthe Canada–US border received an unusual share of attention (Andreas2003), the border with Mexico played—and continues to play—a promi-nent role in this discussion (Ackleson 2005a; Garcia 2003; Waslin 2003).For example, the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus—whosewebsite tells of al Qaeda cells working with Mexican smugglers toC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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sneak across the US southwest border between official ports of entry—endorsed a reading of the border as “Terrorist Alley”.1 That the 9/11hijackers did not cross into the US from Mexico—or in fact across anyland border—is apparently besides the point (Ackleson 2005b).

It would be misleading, however, to claim that 9/11 ushered in novelUS immigration enforcement practices at the Mexico–US border. Forexample, pre- and post-9/11 US immigration policing strategies are un-derwritten by a comparably racialized and nationalist discourse of threatwhich typifies the Mexico–US border as a site where masses of immi-grants from the global south are poised to overthrow the ethno-culturaland economic “territorial sanctity” of the US (Purcell and Nevins 2005).But also in a more grounded sense, the Bush administration’s war onterrorism, brought to bear in the US southwest, is but an augmentation ofthe immigration policing practices engineered and fine-tuned under theformer Clinton administration (Ackleson 1999; Andreas 2003; Coleman2005). In this sense, the current expansion of immigration agents, fences,and surveillance technologies at the border—financed by the largest bor-der enforcement budgets ever contemplated by Congress—replays therigid either/or territorial logic of the immigration enforcement strategiesinitiated in the mid-1990s under President Clinton’s Operation Gate-keeper, well documented by Nevins (2002). Moreover, current immi-gration enforcement at the border echoes the Clinton era in that it, too,makes increasingly indistinct military and police practices—what Bigo(2001:106) calls the “blurring of the line between what belongs to in-ternal security and what belongs to external security or defense” (seealso Andreas and Price 2001). Predictably, this has ensured that immi-grant deaths due to the militarization of immigration policing remaina pressing problem at the border (Cornelius 2001; Eschbach, Haganand Rodrıguez 2003; Nevins 2003; Reyes, Johnson and van Swearingen2002).2

The point is that post-9/11 US immigration policing at the south-west border is part of a decades-old expansion of low-intensity warfaretactics there (Dunn 1996) and as such is best understood in terms ofa longstanding politics of anxiety in the US concerning Mexican un-documented migration (Heyman 1999). This said, 9/11 did signpost achange of accent insofar as the events of that day surfaced new spacesof immigration-related geopolitical practice. Despite the obvious im-portance and continuity of border policing per se to pre- and post-9/11immigration geopolitics, then, perhaps the most significant yet largelyignored immigration-related fallout of the recently conceived war onterrorism has been the growth of interior immigration policing prac-tices, nominally geared to fight terrorism but in practice often concernedwith a broader problematic of undocumented labor migration. Properlyspeaking these practices—and the laws that inform them—date from the1990s. However, these interior immigration enforcement practices haveC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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been recently extended and deepened to assume a newly central placein US immigration enforcement efforts.

In order to get at these interior spaces of immigration geopolitics andat how they work, I will document two recent shifts in US immigrationpolicing which, in conjunction with the border militarization processsketched out above, I take to be definitive of the post-9/11 immigra-tion enforcement landscape. First, lawmakers since the mid-1990s havesought to bind immigration control to criminal law enforcement, suchthat a criminal conviction can be used as grounds for deportation fromthe US. I refer to this as the criminalization of immigration law. As partof this process, lawmakers have carved out a paradoxical space in whichimmigration policing occurs. This space, while strictly speaking codi-fied in law, is ultimately about limiting the legal review of immigrationand criminal charges brought against undocumented migrants and oth-ers. As I will argue below, this mode of immigration governance meansthat immigration law is ultimately exempted from judicial review, evenas it works largely on the basis of criminal law.

Second, there has been a concerted effort on the part of lawmakersand the Bush administration, particularly since 9/11, to use local proxyforces—or non-federal delegates—to enforce immigration law. I arguethat together, the criminalization of immigration law, as well as theenrollment of proxy immigration officers at sub-state scales, constitute anew localized or rescaled geopolitics of immigration policing. Althoughintended broadly as a border policing initiative, these practices takeplace at some significant remove from US borders, and specificallyfrom the Mexico–US border. And although conducted under the pretextof counterterrorism, these laws and practices implicate for the most parta more general category of undocumented migrants.

These newly materializing spaces of immigration geopolitics are im-portant to consider because they demonstrate that border enforcementand immigration policing are neither one and the same thing nor coter-minous. Indeed, I argue that these embryonic spaces of immigrationpolicing shed new light on the spatiality of US immigration policingefforts, which typically have been thought of by geographers as activeprimarily at the territorial margins of the state. But by suggesting thatimmigration-related geopolitics at the border have been supplementedin the interior and away from the border, my point is not to reify the localas a discrete arena of politicking (Cox 1998). Nor is it my point to insistthat state territoriality belongs to a now defunct era usurped by local,regional, and/or global governance structures (Mansfield 2005). Rather,my goal is, first, to refuse the state writ large as the only meaningfulscale at which governance regarding immigration is operative, and sec-ond, to explore the local as something more than a site nested neatly andsubordinately within the national. The point is to refuse both a “method-ological territorialism” and “methodological nationalism” in the study ofC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


contemporary immigration geopolitics (Brenner 2004:38). The formerassumes that relations of power are bound to discrete state territorialities,and the latter that relations of power are territorialized coherently at andacross the national scale. In sum, I hope to show that in the case of im-migration enforcement, the spatiality of state governance is now muchmore complicated than the straightforward enforcement of an either/orterritoriality at the edges of the state. By pointing to the complex rescal-ing and localized contestation of immigration policing after 9/11, I arguethat state geopolitical power is undergoing an adjustment mostly at themunicipal scale, and that the outcome of immigration-related strategiesof governance are as a result less than clear.

In the next section, I outline the rapprochement between criminal lawand immigration enforcement that took place during the 1990s and after9/11, as well as how this development relied on the gradual limitationof court oversight over immigration enforcement. In a second section, Idiscuss the exceptional constitution of federal immigration law, and therelevance of the so-called plenary power doctrine to that exceptionalism.Third, I look to the spatiality of current immigration enforcement prac-tices, and in detail at the post-9/11 enrollment of sub-state proxy forcesby federal immigration authorities. I argue that the power to police im-migration has been devolved to local scale peace officers who until veryrecently were not permitted to enforce immigration law. I conclude thepaper by asking how the two major trends discussed in the paper—thedevelopment of a criminalized and exceptional immigration law, andthe devolution of immigration policing—might compel geographers tothink differently about the location and substance of US immigrationenforcement efforts of relevance to the Mexico–US border.

The Criminalization of Immigration LawCongress passed a bevy of laws in the mid-1990s intended to obstruct un-documented migration to the US.3 These laws resulted from widespreadbipartisan panic concerning the professed links between urban crime,welfare abuse, terrorism, inner city drug addiction, the failure of themelting pot citizenship model and the growth of undocumented mi-gration. The legislation in question can be considered a complex ofinstrumental, expressive and symbolic statutes which sought to reviseimmigration law by disrupting existing judicial practices concerning im-migration enforcement, which lawmakers on the whole believed to beoverly lenient (Tushnet and Yackle 1997).4 Together the laws treatedan overwhelming volume of amendments to the 1952 Immigration andNationality Act (INA) (Gimpel and Edwards 1999), and in conjunctionwith the Clinton administration’s then newly conceived US SouthwestStrategic Doctrine of Border Control, resulted in a significant milita-rization of the Mexico–US border. However, two important but oftenC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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underacknowledged shifts in immigration enforcement brought aboutas a result of this period of frenzied immigration lawmaking did notdeal directly with border enforcement. These provisions expanded thecriminal grounds for deportation from the US and limited the scope ofjudicial review over immigration enforcement.5 Although as a wholethe laws were concerned to increase immigration enforcement directlyat the Mexico–US border, these measures were intended explicitly tobolster immigration enforcement efforts in the interior and thereby re-duce undocumented migration, primarily across the Mexico–US border,by heightening disincentives to migrate. These changes are importantinsofar as they constitute the conceptual and practical scaffolding ofpost-9/11 immigration-related lawmaking and enforcement.

Immigration law reform efforts in Congress during the 1990s signifi-cantly enlarged the category of crimes which could count as aggravatedfelonies—a specific class of crimes committed by non-citizens, applica-ble only in the context of immigration law, and warranting deportationfrom the US. The aggravated felony charge was initially legislated in thelate 1980s to deport drug kingpins under murder, firearms and weaponstrafficking charges. In the 1990s, the charge was expanded repeatedly toembrace a huge assortment of crimes, including many misdemeanors orminor offenses (Johnson 2001). The principal goal was to make a broadarray of controlled substances and general property offenses count to-wards immigration inadmissibility. The result was a literal “grab bag ofconvictions” (Coonan 1998:600) with no overall coherence which couldprovoke deportation from the US. For example, the aggravated felonywas made to include prostitution, car theft, forgery, bribery, undocu-mented entry following deportation, perjury, shoplifting, counterfeiting,drug possession, drug addiction, petty theft, simple battery, tax evasion,and more generally any offense with an imposed sentence of one yearor more.6

This detailed expansion of the aggravated felony charge to account fora good deal of non-violent crimes was accompanied by a far-reachingrecalibration of what counted as terms of conviction and imprisonmentfor immigration admissibility purposes. As concerns conviction, thelaws mandated that potential aggravated felony adjudications deferredby judges, regardless of the absence of sentencing, were still to count asconvictions warranting deportation from the US if immigration author-ities could find sufficient evidence that a crime was committed—suchas an initial admission of guilt or some finding excluded from the court-room (Marley 1998). The result was that individuals could be identi-fied as deportable aggravated felons without an explicit conviction foran aggravated felony. As concerns imprisonment, the laws legislatedthat any sentence of one year or more—served or suspended—couldcount as evidence of an aggravated felony. As a result, convictions bothpostponed and suspended by the courts were to count as grounds forC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


deportation (Morawetz 2000). To this, the laws added that the aggra-vated felony charge could be applied retroactively without limit, andthat conviction would entail a permanent bar on re-entry to the US forall deported aliens, without exception (Candioto 1997; Krasker 1998;Morawetz 1998). Moreover, the laws legislated mandatory and indefi-nite incarceration for those charged and awaiting deportation, as well aslengthy jail terms for aggravated felons caught re-entering the US (Cox2001; Legomsky 1999). The result of these provisions was an increas-ingly deep convergence between the criminal and immigration justicesystems, such that a criminal conviction was likely to trigger detention,deportation and permanent exclusion from the US (Kanstroom 2000a),as well as a bizarre multiplier effect whereby minor infractions fromdecades past could be resuscitated in the present to effect deportationfrom, or deny entrance to, the US.7

To substantiate the expansion of the aggravated felony charge, immi-gration law reform undertaken at this time sought also to restrict courtoversight of immigration enforcement. This was done because lawmak-ers considered that aggravated felons and persons unlawfully present inthe country had too many channels of legal petition which resulted intoo many stalled deportation hearings. Two basic remedies were leg-islated. First, the laws stripped the courts of many powers of reviewover aggravated felony criminal cases, and refused access to many le-gal procedures or petitions that could delay removal from the US forthose charged with an aggravated felony (Marley 1998; Gelernt 2001).So, while aggravated felons in the early 1990s had the ability to peti-tion their removal from the US, for example through application for astay of deportation or for political asylum, the new laws implementeda historic series of due process restrictions which limited the judicialand administrative channels available to aggravated felons to contest thedeportation process. Second, the laws introduced a wider sphere of newprocedures of expedited deportation similarly removed from close le-gal scrutiny, to apply broadly to undocumented aliens (McKenzie 1997;Solbakken 1997). Rather than distinguish between aliens who had en-tered the US and those who had not, the new laws introduced the con-cept of “admission”, or authorized and inspected entry to the US. Allunadmitted (ie undocumented) aliens—regardless of geographical loca-tion, at the border or in the interior—were deemed to be permanentlyin the process of unlawfully “seeking entry” or “arriving” until actu-ally apprehended, and thus were labeled as automatically inadmissi-ble (ie deportable) upon apprehension. Recategorized as never havingmade a legitimate entry into the US, undocumented aliens were thustreated extra-territorially as subjects standing at US border ports of entry,and were made subject to summary exclusion by federal immigrationofficers without defense or relief through the courts. This second re-striction of legal oversight over immigration enforcement marked aC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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significant change to what previously stood as the “entry doctrine”,which had afforded due process protections to undocumented aliens ap-prehended in the US on the grounds that they were within the territorialjurisdiction of the federal US court system (Chen 2000; Foster 1997).The single protection left was a substantially overhauled habeas corpusreview which sought only to properly identify deportees prior to theirremoval.

The mid-1990s “severity revolution” (Simon 2001) in immigrationlawmaking and enforcement was ratcheted up by the events of 9/11. In-deed, the current zero tolerance scrutiny of the aggravated felony chargein order to effect deportations, nominally concerned to thwart threatsto national security but in reality occupied with a class of much lessserious offenses such as undocumented entry, means perhaps a final“criminalization of immigration law” (Morris 1997). In other words,9/11 has brought about a near conclusive blurring of what by the late1990s amounted to an already well-faded distinction between the legaloffenses of undocumented laboring, criminal activity by aliens and ter-rorism (Miller 2005). The June 2004 street-level immigration sweepsin southern California are evidence of this development. Resulting in astaggering 11,000 ad-hoc interrogations and some 450 formal detentionsand deportations, the roving Border Patrol operations—reminiscent ofthe mass deportations under Operation Wetback in 1954—were justi-fied under the broad post-9/11 umbrella of securing the border regionand protecting national security, even as they targeted exclusively Mex-ican nationals suspected of working without papers in the US (Martinez2004; Nunez-Neto 2005:27–28; Wilson and Murillo 2004a, 2004b).

At the same time, recent immigration enforcement practice, as in-tended by the earlier wave of 1990s laws, has sought to again distanceimmigration enforcement from the purview of the courts in the formof substantial legal rollbacks (Akram and Johnson 2002; Ashar 2002;Morawetz 2005; Papandrea 2005; Reza 2002; Tumlin 2004; Williams2004). The 2001 PATRIOT Act, for example, authorizes federal offi-cers to arrest and imprison a broad class of non-citizens on immigrationgrounds without legal review and without public disclosure of the spe-cific charge for a period of seven days, or for a maximum of six monthsif the case is deemed a national security risk. Importantly, this lack oflegal oversight portends the use of immigration law for ends that donot relate directly to immigration enforcement per se (Kanstroom 2003,2004). For example, Operation Predator, an initiative run by the De-partment of Homeland Security (DHS) in July 2003—and televised onthe show America’s Most Wanted—rounded up nearly 2000 alien sexoffenders on immigration charges (DHS 2005a, 2005b). The operationwas not intended to police immigration law infractions. Instead, the goalwas to deport criminal alien sex offenders through immigration chan-nels, which provide fewer judicial hurdles for detainment, disclosure ofC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


evidence and eventually, deportation (US Congress, House Subcom-mittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, Committee on theJudiciary 2004). In sum, if before 9/11 immigration law was already wellon its way to becoming deeply bound to criminal law enforcement, thewar on terrorism has facilitated an even deeper convergence between thetwo (Kanstroom 2005). At the same time, the events of 9/11 provokedeven further restrictions on judicial oversight over immigration law en-forcement practices related broadly to alien criminal activity. The pointis that the double-pronged approach to immigration enforcement in the1990s—which in effect expanded the criminal grounds for deportationand limited the reach of legal oversight over these procedures—wasdeepened and extended after 9/11.

The Exceptional Spaces of Immigration LawHow does one best conceptualize the above developments? Withoutdoubt current immigration law as well as the broad gatekeeping func-tion of contemporary immigration enforcement is rooted in the post-CivilWar Chinese Exclusion Acts (Lee 1999). These acts—articulated on thegendered, racialized, and class exceptionality of Chinese immigrants—suspended working class and independent female Chinese immigrationto the US, barred the re-entry of previously admitted Chinese labor-ers, initiated an identity registry for Chinese families in the US, madeundocumented Chinese immigration a deportable crime, and perhapsmost importantly, subjected Chinese immigrants to expanded and non-uniform deportation and exclusion practices whose contestability in thecourts was gradually eroded (Sayler 1991). More accurately, however,current immigration lawmaking and enforcement owes its existence tothe plenary power doctrine over immigration which developed as a con-sequence of the Chinese Exclusion Acts.

The plenary power doctrine transferred the specific exceptionality ofChinese immigration to the immigration power writ large, in order toinsulate immigration enforcement from the judiciary. As a result of nu-merous cases brought by Chinese nationals before the courts in the wakeof the Exclusion Laws, the Supreme Court—eager to find a home for thepower to control immigration—ruled that the immigration mandate wastantamount to the plenary—or unconditional and unimpaired—power ofthe government to conduct international relations and commerce. As aresult, the court concluded that the power to regulate immigration shouldbe an unequivocally federal mandate and that it could not be subject toconstitutional or judicial oversight. In short, the plenary power doctrineawarded congressional representatives and the executive branch of gov-ernment the absolute and unchecked sovereign power to regulate theadmission and expulsion of immigrants with limited judicial oversight,and without adherence to otherwise generally held legal principles. AsC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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Wishnie (2003:739–740) puts it, the “Court . . . linked immigration lawto foreign affairs and national security and insisted on substantial def-erence [of the courts] to the judgments of the political branches”. Thebasis of the ruling was that immigration is a national security matterakin to waging war, whose pressing geopolitical constitution trumpsthe need to extend judicial protections to non-nationals in the US orseeking entry to the US (Olafson 1999; Holland 2000; Wishnie 2001a;Engle 2004). From this perspective, immigration law and enforcementis only partially about public policy analysis (Bigo 2002; Tichenor2002).

It is this same foreign-policy-centric plenary power of lawmakersand the executive to make and implement laws governing immigrationwhich lies at the core of the immigration lawmaking and enforcementefforts today. But contemporary immigration lawmaking suggests thatthere is more to this power than simply the straightforward exorcism ofjudicial review in the name of national security and geopolitical strat-egy. The plenary power over immigration does not simply jettison thelaw. Rather, it works paradoxically through the law as it at once holdsthe law at bay. In other words, present-day immigration enforcementworks by closing the gap between immigration control and criminal lawoffenses as it at once widens the gap between on-the-ground enforce-ment and judicial review. In this way, the contemporary expression ofthe plenary power over immigration presents us with the puzzle of anextra-legal law: immigration law and enforcement is about curtailingaliens’ rights of due process while at once making them the object oflaws which hold them closely accountable to standards (and definitions)of criminal justice which would certainly be contested if court scrutinyof the process was permitted, or if these same standards were appliedto US citizens. We might say that current US immigration law worksby placing the subjects of immigration law—for the most part undocu-mented migrants, as we shall see below—in the position of being legallyanswerable to increasingly detailed criminal provisions codified in lawwhich at once are themselves subject to increasingly narrow channelsof legal contestation.

From this perspective I think that immigration law is somewhat of amisnomer. Properly stated, the plenary power enables immigration en-forcement practices which float—by design—separately from the rule oflaw. In this sense, the plenary power to make immigration law is about de-lineating a space of policing practices—a juridical void—which cannotbe subject to constitutional review and/or protection, notwithstanding itsreliance on the criminal justice system as well as its own formal codifi-cation as law in the INA. The point is that immigration law works less asa law and more as a sort of (permanent) state of emergency in which theconcrete, authoritarian power of the sovereign (in this case, lawmakers)comes down decisively—or, exceptionally—on migrant bodies, in theC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


name of public security, via a selective deployment of the law (Schmitt,1985 [1933]).

In this sense, I find that recent discussion of the “force of law”(Agamben 2005) offers a compelling way of conceptualizing contem-porary immigration law and enforcement in the US. The turn of phrase“force of law”, or “force of law without law”, means that sovereignpower—which generally declares nothing to be outside the law—works paradoxically through the postponement of generally held legalnorms and practices. However, these postponements, or more accuratelysovereign exceptions to law, do not imply a “simple topographical oppo-sition (inside/outside)” in which the law and the political are hermeticallysealed spaces bridged by the sovereign, who moves arbitrarily betweenthe two when the need arises (Agamben 2005: 23). Rather, the state ofexception functions as the decisive moment within a larger context ofliberal constitutionalism (Agamben 1998). The “force of law”, then, de-scribes a contradictory, but ultimately effective, liberal juridico-politicalgovernmentality characterized by an indistinction between law and vi-olence. Here, the sovereign obliges bodies to the law by making theirconduct dependent on it, but in so doing may at once and in the same placeforsake them to the political, or to a sphere of extra-juridical violences,in the event that a state of emergency (ie a threat to national security) issaid to exist. In this sense, the declaration of a state of emergency “is thepoint of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on whichviolence passes into law and law passes over into violence” (Agamben1998:32).What is produced given some contravention of the law—in thiscase, immigration law—and the abandonment of (non-citizen) bodies tothe political, then, is an unmediated, extra-juridical space of punishmentin which there is limited recourse to the courts to contest the sovereign’sexercise of power.

Interior Enforcement and the Devolution of theImmigration Power after 9/11The above typification of US immigration law as a collection ofsovereign decrees is meant to indicate how immigration enforcementpractices are paradoxically sequestered to an exceptional space carvedout by lawmakers who decide what should—and more importantly, whatshould not—be included under the umbrella of legal review as concernsthe power to police immigration. But at the same time, this exceptionalspace of immigration lawmaking is in no easy sense “sovereign”, ifthe latter term means exercised between blocks of undifferentiated statespace and with particular vigor at the territorial margins of the state.Indeed, despite its explicit affiliation with the power to conduct for-eign affairs and commerce, which are typically thought relevant onlyoutside the black box of the state and in terms of inter-state relations,C© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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the sovereign exceptionality of immigration law corresponds to a re-scaling of immigration enforcement in still emerging localized spacesof immigration geopolitics.

This is so in two senses. First, there has been a marked increasein immigration policing operations away from borders in the interior.Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, there has been a devolution ofthe federal immigration power to non-federal officers, who have a greaterpresence in these interior immigration enforcement spaces. In concert,the growth of interior enforcement operations and the devolution of thefederal power to police immigration are about pushing border enforce-ment inwards toward the municipal scale and away from the marginsof the state. This is not to suggest that the Mexico–US border—amongother borders—has been rendered insignificant. Rather, it is to suggestthat US immigration policing—in addition to its conventional locationat the border—has been down-scaled in important ways as a result ofthe 1990s period of lawmaking, and especially as part of the war onterrorism. In other words, these new spaces of immigration geopoliticssuggest that the border—and border enforcement—is increasingly ev-erywhere. I will tackle interior enforcement and the devolution of theimmigration power in turn below.

The expansion of the aggravated felony charge and the limitationof judicial review over deportation have combined on the ground toproduce a remarkable spike in interior immigration enforcement opera-tions, at least as measured by annual deportation statistics. This shouldnot be surprising, as the laws passed over the 1990s and after 9/11 havesnowballed, first, to vastly expand the population of aliens subject to de-portation; and second, to hasten the removal of aliens under accelerated,extra-judicial channels, particularly if found to be unlawfully in the USor if charged as aggravated felons in some other capacity. Between 1992and 2003, for example, during exactly the period when the aggravatedfelony charge was being expanded and court oversight of immigrationpolicing was being curtailed, deportable aliens located in the interior ofthe US as a percentage of immigration apprehensions at the southwestborder more than doubled. Whereas in 1992 immigration apprehensionsby “investigations districts” (ie in the interior) made up approximately5% of total immigration apprehensions made by the Border Patrol at thesouthwest border with Mexico, by 2003 immigration apprehensions inthe interior had jumped nearly threefold to approximately 13% of south-west border apprehensions, with the single largest increases coming in1997—directly after a major bout of immigration lawmaking in 1996dealing with the aggravated felony offense—and then again in 2002directly after 9/11 (Immigration and Naturalization Service 2002:242,2003:244; DHS 2004:155). The overwhelming bulk of these cases in-volve nationals from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador,who presumably entered at some point across the Mexico–US border.C© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


Thus, even if Mexico–US border region apprehensions continue to makeup the vast majority of total apprehensions, interior immigration enforce-ment numbers are proportionally on the rise, and deserve attention asan increasingly important component of this total. Moreover, we shouldanticipate a further escalation of interior enforcement operations. TheImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the DHS, for ex-ample, is readying to vastly expand immigration policing in the interioras part of the war on terrorism (General Accounting Office 2004) whilethe Bush administration (as well as prominent members of Congress)intonate regularly that any future immigration legislation concerningMexico will necessitate stepped-up immigration-related criminal en-forcement operations in the US interior, away from the Mexico–USborder (US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary 2005).

While a wide range of legally resident aliens and refugee claimantswere affected by this recent expansion of interior immigration enforce-ment (Lagenfeld 1999; Martin 1999; Kanstroom 2000b), undocumentedaliens were doubtlessly the primary focus of the law reform movement.For example, the undocumented migrant was consistently referencedby lawmakers as the central subject of the 1990s laws, often due tothe supposed threat “it” posed to unemployed American workers, state-funded welfare programs, urban safety, etc. (Coleman 2005). Indeed,it is safe to say that without the perceived threat posed by the undocu-mented migrant, and the way undocumented migrants were inflated andheld accountable for a number of different social ills (Nevins 2002), theabove changes to the INA around the aggravated felony charge wouldnever have been contemplated by lawmakers. But in a more tangiblesense, too, undocumented migrants were in the sights of the laws aslawmakers sought explicitly to render insecure the conditions of pos-sibility of undocumented laboring in the US. For example, the expan-sion of the aggravated felony category over the 1990s to include the“crime” of unauthorized entry, and particularly unauthorized re-entryfollowing an aggravated felony deportation (for which undocumentedentry counts), meant that significant numbers of undocumented laborerscould be deported from the US with extremely limited ability to petitiontheir removal via either judicial or administrative channels. DHS datashow that a major impact of this period of lawmaking was not simplyan increase in the number of formal deportations but more specificallya large jump in the number of aliens detained and deported for being“present without documentation” in the interior. In 1991 this numbertotaled some 13,000 individuals; this number has now increased almostsixfold to more than 70,000 cases annually (DHS 2004:157).

This heightened scrutiny of undocumented aliens in the interior pro-ceeds, of course, without overtly policing the physical workplace—a move unpopular with agribusiness and other major beneficiaries ofundocumented labor (Calavita 1989). In fact, there appears to be anC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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inverse relationship between workplace enforcement and interior immi-gration enforcement. Whereas interior immigration policing—measuredin terms of the above deportation versus border enforcement ratio—increased throughout the 1990s and after 9/11, workplace enforcementdeclined precipitously after 1997. In that year there were some 17,000workplace enforcement cases; in 2000 there were 1000; by 2003 thisnumber had dropped to 445 (DHS 2004:147, 157). Indeed, year-endDepartment of Homeland Security data show that the bulk of interior en-forcement operations are extra-workplace investigations. On the whole,deportees are located by immigration officers surveying the US inmatepopulation and court dockets for aggravated felons; as a result of street-level criminal investigations to which federal immigration officers areparty; and, via entitlements and services fraud investigations launchedby state and local authorities and reported to the DHS. We can conclude,then, that one major upshot of the most recent 16-year bout of immi-gration law reform has been the legal transformation of undocumentedmigrants in the interior into “permanent criminals” subject to expandedand expedited deportation practices outside the workplace (Kanstroom2004).

This said, I do not mean to imply some uniform interior federal territo-riality throughout which immigration enforcement occurs. Rather, whatwe now see emerging is an uneven urban geography of immigration lawenforcement which is more strict in some areas than others, and whichat times pitches the federal government against local governments. Thishas come about due to municipal laws which contest the application offederal immigration law, and federal counter-attempts to undo or oth-erwise circumvent these practices after 9/11 by devolving immigrationenforcement to willing local authorities.

Many cities have non-compliance ordinances on the books which pro-hibit municipal employees—particularly police officers and emergencyworkers—from cooperating in federal immigration enforcement efforts,for instance, by communicating the immigration status of their clientsto federal authorities. These “don’t ask–don’t tell” policies date backto the 1980s sanctuary movement in which churches and synagoguesprovided safe haven to migrants escaping Central America. Refugeesat the time were unlikely to be recognized as legitimate claimants dueto the Reagan administration’s tacit support for the governments theywere fleeing, and so a vast underground network of human rights ac-tivists and church members evolved to provide “illegal” shelter forthem (Bau 1994; Coutin 1993). The sanctuary movement—which inessence created a multiplicity of spaces of protest where federal im-migration law was de facto exempted—spread to municipal and some-times state levels. By the end of the 1980s, for example, entire stateslike New Mexico and Oregon, as well as a slew of major cities up anddown the California coastline, had declared themselves sanctuary sitesC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


(Cunningham 1995:62–66). A surprising number of major US cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Seattle, Albuquerque, Denver, NewYork, Austin, Houston, Durham, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Ann Arbor,Portland, Chicago, and Atlanta, to name but a few—still had these ordi-nances intact after 9/11 (Seghetti, Vina and Ester 2004:21–22).

In the wake of 9/11 these municipal-scale obstructions to federal im-migration law have come under intense scrutiny (US Congress, HouseSubcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, Commit-tee on the Judiciary 2003b), and have been referred to by leading re-strictionist lobby groups as “a growing impediment to combating thewave of illegal aliens residing in the country” (FAIR 2003). Lawmak-ers, increasingly interested in the possibility for a more effective interiorimmigration enforcement strategy (US Congress, Subcommittee on Im-migration, Border Security and Claims 2002), have explicitly called forthe abolition of sanctuary ordinances on national security grounds, aswell as for concerted federal legal court action against non-compliantcities and states. Indeed, Congress is considering legislation which ifpassed would forcibly compel state and local law enforcement agenciesto make immigration-related arrests, specifically in those cities wheresanctuary laws currently stand (US Congress, House Subcommittee onImmigration, Border Security and Claims, Committee on the Judiciary2003a). If passed, the legislation will cut off federal monies for local lawenforcement offices which refuse to cooperate with federal immigrationauthorities.

The Bush administration has also become keenly interested in gettingaround sanctuary ordinances. For instance, following 9/11 the Depart-ment of Justice repealed a long-standing legal opinion which held thatlocal police officers did not have the authority to make immigration-related arrests (White House 2002). The now deposed ruling denied thatnon-federal peace officers could enforce immigration law on the basisthat states and localities cannot pass or enforce laws that either contra-dict or complement extensive federal legislation, in this case as regardsimmigration violations (Benitez 1994). In place of the old opinion is anew reading on the local enforcement of immigration law which arguesthat non-federal officers indeed have the “inherent authority” to arrestaliens for immigration violations, and that local peace officers have thesubsequent power to transfer to federal authorities aliens imprisoned forentering the country without documentation (Lewis et al 2002; Seghetti,Vina and Ester 2004:7–9; Wishnie 2001b). Because this new readingon the devolvability of the immigration power to local authorities is notavailable for public consumption, the rationale behind the change to theold ruling—that is, beyond the logic that the current war on terrorismconstitutes a state of exception—remains unclear. However, the conceptof federal immigration enforcement by local proxies has been corrobo-rated enthusiastically in Congress. For example, lawmakers re-legislatedC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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an unenforced section of the INA in the 2001 PATRIOT Act, which dealswith the local enforcement of immigration law (Chisti 2002). The rel-evant section encourages state and local law enforcement authoritiesto sign special “memorandums of understanding” with the Departmentof Homeland Security so that local officers can “identify, process, andwhen appropriate, detain immigration offenders they encounter duringtheir regular, daily law enforcement activity” (DHS 2005c).

As one observer puts it, the goal here is “to enhance enforcement ofimmigration laws by adding 650,000 state police officers to the 20,000federal border patrol agents, of whom only 1947 have been employedfor internal enforcement” (Herman 2004:1221).8 And perhaps most im-portantly, given that the Bush administration and Congress have re-quested and not compelled cooperation, is that localities are respondingfavorably. Florida, Virginia, and Alabama have filed memorandums ofunderstanding which allow their state troopers to report the immigra-tion status of detained individuals to federal authorities, and to makeimmigration arrests. Likewise, under pressure from the Bush admin-istration, Mayor Bloomberg announced the termination of New YorkCity’s sanctuary laws in May 2004. Similarly, the Los Angeles andOrange County police departments have unofficially agreed to reportundocumented migrants to the DHS, and moreover have arranged forspecial immigration law enforcement training for their officers (Winton2005; Winton and Blankstein 2005). Moreover, the grassroots Proposi-tion 200 in Arizona, which compels that state’s law enforcement officersto make immigration-related arrests, has been recently expanded underthe national umbrella group Protect America Now to seven states: Vir-ginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Washington, Nebraska, Georgia, and Mas-sachusetts (Barry 2004).9

ConclusionBorders and border policing are important and ongoing components ofimmigration enforcement in the US. And, as noted at the outset of thepaper, the present clampdown at the border—as with Operations Hold-the-Line and Gatekeeper, initiated in the mid-1990s—translates intolarge numbers of fatalities there as undocumented migrants are forcedto navigate treacherous landscapes adjacent to increasingly fortified ur-ban corridors. This said, the argument I have tried to make in this paperis that there is more going on than borders and border policing when itcomes to understanding how the US is dealing with immigration enforce-ment. I will conclude with three thoughts about how geographers mightthink differently about the location and substance of US immigrationenforcement efforts of relevance to the Mexico–US border.

First, immigration enforcement can be rethought in terms broaderthan the straightforward deployment of troops and immigration agentsC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


directly at the external frontiers of the state. Part of what I have tried toconceptualize above is a shift in the where of immigration policing: thatUS immigration policing, particularly after 9/11, and through the lensof counterterrorism, has shifted gears insofar as interior enforcementhas taken on a renewed importance since that date. Indeed, the emerg-ing complementarity between immigration policing efforts at the borderand new spaces of immigration geopolitics in the interior, via local andstate actors who previously enjoyed little or no power to enforce immi-gration law, is what I take as the most significant aspect of post-9/11immigration lawmaking. For this reason, geographers might differenti-ate between border policing (ie directly at the territorial margins of thestate) and a spatially looser configuration of boundary policing prac-tices. By boundary policing I mean practices of internal organizationand external bounding constitutive of state territoriality (Agnew 1997),but undertaken by a multiplicity of federal and local actors and not geo-graphically limited to the territorial margins of the state. In other words,boundary policing might refer to border policing and practices of immi-grant regulation which take place away from state borders, even if theyare in the end concerned to regulate the flow of bodies across the latter—a sort of border enforcement from afar. Moreover, using the OperationPredator example discussed above, immigration-related boundary polic-ing need not have immigration enforcement strictly speaking as its goal,even if the deportation of aliens is achieved through the latter. Indeed,boundary policing, at least in terms of the discussion above, can be con-ceptualized as a far-reaching mode of “extended border control” in whichundocumented migrants and others are “harbored subject to the whimof the government and may be deported whenever the government sodesires . . . a shifting, even retroactive, regime of deportation sanctions”dependent on political context rather than strictly on the transgressionof immigration law (Kanstroom 2000a:1907).

Second, to take up immigration enforcement as such—ie in terms oflocalized relations of social control, which while disproportionately im-pacting undocumented laborers does not entail an increase in workplaceinvestigations—also means that geographers give renewed attention tothe what of immigration enforcement. Immigration law has typically(and with good reason) been side-stepped by geographers in favor of amore grounded focus on immigration enforcement practices themselves,which at least in the Mexico–US case study raise a number of immediateand pressing social justice questions. But the expansion of interior im-migration enforcement in the US over the 1990s and after 9/11, as I havetried to demonstrate, has to do with the criminalization of immigrationlaw; or, with how lawmakers have merged and then sequestered crim-inal law and immigration law to an exceptional space of immigrationenforcement practices paradoxically beyond judicial reproach. In thissense, practices of immigration enforcement are rooted squarely in theC© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.

70 Antipode

geopolitics of immigration law, which we might define as the strategicbracketing—or placing aside—of the reach of constitutional law. Thisstrategic bracketing ensures the expedited removal of undocumentedmigrants and others under criminal law charges, now increasingly atthe hands of local authorities and under the generally unproblematizedguise of counterterrorism. While geographers have dealt broadly withthe intersection of law, power and space, this specific nexus between lawand immigration enforcement—and indeed, the geopolitical role playedby immigration lawmaking—requires more research.

Lastly, to focus on the legal basis of immigration policing brings usto the problem of the uneven spatiality of immigration enforcement.To examine the geopolitics of immigration law is at once to examinehow statecraft is about increasingly irregular and uncertain localizedconditions of possibility rather than about coherent, macro-scale strate-gies of state governance (see generally, Dahlman and O Tuathail 2005;Graham 2004; Warren 2002). In addition to rethinking immigration en-forcement away from the border and in terms of immigration law and theexceptional practices it authorizes, I think it important to underline howimmigration enforcement is being multiplied and activated unevenlyacross sites which, although typically thought marginal or at least tan-gential to geopolitical practice, are increasingly otherwise. As notedabove, the post-9/11 devolution of immigration law enforcement to lo-cal proxy forces has occasioned a patchwork municipal geography ofinterior immigration enforcement, as certain localities sign immigrationenforcement memorandums with the Department of Homeland Securitywhile others do not.

But the situation is arguably more complex than simply the productionof an uneven geography of participating and non-participating localities.In other words, the problem is not simply one of regional differentia-tion. At stake is a larger question about the myriad, conflicting scales ofimmigration policing in the US, a problem rarely if at all noted in theacademic literature. In the case of municipal non-compliance relatedto immigration, federal immigration law is obstructed on the groundvia municipal ordinances which—in a sort of mirroring of the excep-tionality of federal immigration law—declare cities as exceptional sitesexempt from federal immigration laws. While immigration law worksincreasingly, then, via an exception to the domestic rule of law, munici-pal immigration-related ordinances themselves work via an exception toimmigration law. And of course this is challenged by the post-9/11 ex-tension of federal immigration proxies into select urban centers, whichbrings the exceptionality of federal immigration law to bear directly onurban spaces, albeit by non-federal agents. The result is a convolutedhierarchy of interpenetrating scales of exception or exemption in rela-tion to the law, in which the final territorial jurisdiction of immigrationenforcement remains fundamentally unsettled.C© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation C© 2007 Editorial Board of Antipode.


AcknowledgementsMy sincere thanks to Bruce D’Arcus, Joe Nevins, Joe Heyman, MaryThomas and Melissa Wright for their insightful and constructive com-ments on this paper.

Endnotes1 http://tancredo.house.gov/irc/welcome.htm2 Border deaths slowed after 9/11 but remain well above those registered before the Gate-keeper operations commenced (Eschbach, Hagan and Rodrıguez 2003; Nevins 2003).The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (2005) reports that betweenOctober 2004 and September 2005 some 460 migrant bodies were recovered from theborder region.3 The 1990 Immigration Act, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law EnforcementAct, the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the 1996 IllegalImmigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.4 Instrumental statutes effect a change to legal practice; expressive statutes communicatevalues through legislation; and, symbolic statutes make a political statement, with littleintention to change law.5 Technically, this bout of lawmaking eliminated “deportation”. The concept of “re-moval” was introduced in its place to do away with the procedural distinctions between“exclusion” (ie denial of entrance at the border) and “deportation” (ie removal from theinterior). The goal was to purge court protections offered under the latter. I use the word“deportation” to refer to “removals”.6 For a list of aggravated felonies, see Coonan (1998), Cook (2003) and Marley (1998).7 Marley (1998:886–887): “The results of these combined effects can border on bizarre.For example, an offense that, when committed in 1958 was only a minor infraction istransformed . . . into a heinous act, an aggravated felony; a deferred adjudication for the1958 offense that emphatically was not a conviction metamorphosizes into a ‘conviction’in 1996; a suspended sentence not worthy of a single day in jail for a 1958 transgressiontransmogrifies itself into ‘imprisonment’ worthy of deportation in 1996”.8 There are approximately 11,500 border patrol agents, not 20,000.9 Some localities are maintaining their independence. New Haven is considering mu-nicipal identification cards for undocumented aliens to allow greater security from de-portation when dealing with local police (Yardley 2005). Longmont, CO has hired an“immigrant integration coordinator” to integrate documented and undocumented mi-grants safely and more fully into the city (Johnson 2005).

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