Book Description

Abstract: In the past ten years, local law enforcement agencies have increasingly taken up formal agreements with the federal government which allow them to participate in enforcing immigration laws. The most well-known of these agreements is called 287(g). This thesis analyzes the development of 287(g) in Wake County and Durham County, North Carolina, by examining the policing practices that are associated with immigration enforcement and the immigrant removals process. This project uses qualitative data (including interviews, landscape analysis, court room ethnography, and document analysis) and quantitative analysis (based on police documents and census data) to compare policing practices and outcomes related to immigration enforcement. The project shows that local immigration enforcement policies disproportionately effect residents in Latino/a neighborhoods, resulting the arrest and deportation of local residents on the disproportionate basis of minor traffic violations. This thesis contributes to the literature on the geography of state power by demonstrating that immigration enforcement is not only a federal project that targets border regulation, but is a territorial practice which local law enforcement agencies far from the border use to control local immigrant populations and reproduce national boundaries of political belonging.