Racism in Immigration Enforcement

In spite of ICE’s official stance condemning racial profiling (U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement), emerging ethnographic evidence indicates that there is systemic racism in immigration enforcement. In particular, Afro-Caribbeans and Latinos are especially likely to be targeted by immigration enforcement measures and deported from the United States (Fussell forthcoming; Golash-Boza 2012; Hoyt 2011). For example, ethnographic research by Joe Heyman (2001) demonstrates that INS (now ICE) agents at the U.S.-Mexico border use stereotypes to classify immigrants into categories of offenders. Heyman reports, “An INS investigator (a former Border Patrol officer) spoke of ‘Jose Mexican, I mean Jose alien’ to represent a humble, hard-working, nonviolent, but illegal immigrant. Certain other nationalities are supposed to be more dangerous. The same officer said about criminal aliens, ‘tell me the nationality, I’ll tell you the crime’” (2001:131).

Nationwide, immigrants from Latin America make up about 75 percent of the total unauthorized immigrant population, but they have accounted for over 90 percent of deportees since 2000 (Fussell forthcoming; U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2009). Mexicans make up 59 percent of the undocumented U.S. population, but have constituted between 65 and 80 percent of deportees each year between 2000 and 2009 (Fussell forthcoming; see also Passel and Cohn 2009). Tanya Golash Boza (2012) found that Central Americans are many times more likely to be deported than Asians, who make up just under a quarter of the undocumented population; she reports that undocumented Hondurans have a ten percent chance of being deported and undocumented Guatemalans have a five percent chance; in contrast, unauthorized Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indians, and Chinese all have less than a one percent chance of being deported (2012:89). Golash Boza concludes that immigration enforcement especially targets Afro-Caribbean petty drug dealers and undocumented Latinos with “immigration agents us[ing] racial profiling to deport as many people as possible” (2012:83).

Studies of local immigration enforcement practices have also found evidence of racial profiling. One study conducted in Irving, Texas by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute found that, following the 2006 establishment of a partnership between local law enforcement and ICE, arrests of Latinos for minor offenses, particularly traffic violations, increased markedly. The study also found that local police arrested Latinos for misdemeanor offenses in significantly higher numbers than they arrested whites and African Americans. The authors conclude that there is “strong evidence” to support the charge that local law enforcement officials used racial profiling of Latinos in order to screen them for immigration violations (Gardner II and Kohli 2009).

In McHenry County, Illinois, a 2011 Chicago Tribune investigation found that county police officers were misreporting the race of people they stopped in order to hide widespread racial profiling and detention of Latinos. The Tribune analysis showed that in 2009, one in three Latinos was either mislabeled as white or omitted from department data altogether; if included, the department’s official rate of minority stops would have have been 65 percent higher than in nearby Chicago (Mahr and McCoppin 2009). Since McHenry County is one of several Illinois counties enrolled in ICE’s Secure Communities program, anyone who is arrested by county police is automatically run through the DHS database; if there is a “hit,” that person may be detained and taken into custody by ICE, regardless of whether he or she is ultimately convicted of any crime. Thus, disproportionate arrests of Latinos in McHenry County increases their chance of deportation relative to other immigrant groups.

Perhaps the most well known argument regarding racial profiling in immigration enforcement has occurred in the debates surrounding Arizona’s SB 1070. The original provisions of SB 1070 would have required police throughout Arizona to investigate the immigration status of anyone they have “reasonable suspicion” of being undocumented, but it left open how “reasonable suspicion” of a person’s immigration status would be determined. Supporters of the bill assured the public that skin color would not be a determining factor and that police would be trained to look at other characteristics, such as clothing and non-verbal behaviors, that are putatively indicative of undocumented status. These assurances brought derision from the bill’s critics, who argued that race would become the de facto criterion for questioning by police (see Golash Boza 2012; Heyman 2010). A federal judge ultimately determined that this provision of SB 1070 was unconstitutional, but the proliferation of “copycat” legislation in states across the country ensures the continuation of heated debates about racial profiling in immigration enforcement.

In fact, a “Mexican appearance” has been grounds for detention by immigration authorities in the past (for example, in sweeps during the Great Depression and in 1954’s Operation Wetback; see Gutierrez 1995), and it continues to be a predictor of a person’s likelihood of detention and deportation, as shown above. In wider society, racialization of Latinos in conjunction with widespread anti-immigrant sentiment has led to a rise in discrimination and hate crimes against Latinos (Chavez 2008). Surveys of Latinos in 2006 reported that the majority (54 to 76 percent) perceive an increase in discrimination as a result of immigration policy debates (Campo-Flores 2006; Suro and Escobar 2006). Federal crime statistics indicate that these perceptions are well-founded: attacks on Latinos in the U.S. surged 40 percent from 2003 to 2007 (Urbina 2009). In all, these studies confirm that popular imaginaries of the prototypical “illegal immigrant” map onto a racialized Latino phenotype, converting Latinos throughout the United States into the main targets of immigration enforcement measures.