Latinos and Deportation Arrests

Relationships between Race and Justice in Immigration Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seen a 43% rise in immigrations arrests since the Trump Administration took office in 2017 (Wamsley, 2017). This should not be surprising as it comes on the heels of a presidential campaign in which Trump promoted an anti-immigration agenda and identified illegal Latino immigrants as virtually enemy #1 of the American people.

Using concepts of race, violence, and justice, Trump fostered an “America First” platform that sought to place the problems of the American community, economy, ethics and justice on the backs of Latinos in a way that made them seem remarkably like a scapegoat for the presidential hopeful. With Trump’s election, the campaign pledges became promises that would be kept.

As the Associated Press reported in February 2018, “people arrested by deportation officers increasingly have no criminal backgrounds, according to figures released Friday, reflecting the Trump administration’s commitment to cast a wider net.” As Trump intersected race with justice from the beginning of his campaign, the rise in deportation arrests of Latinos shows that the rhetoric was more than just bluster: today’s political agenda reflects a relationship between race and justice that throws serious questions upon both.

Is justice really just if it is racially profiling and targeting individuals who have had no prior criminal record and seemingly pose no threat to American security? That is the question posed by the AP (2018)—and while enforcing immigration laws is certainly within the scope of ICE and its mandate, the worry that some communities have is that this crackdown on illegal immigration will upset a carefully crafted balance between whites and Latinos, one that has taken years to develop.

In America, race is always an issue and one that many people seek to overcome in order to promote concepts of equality and fraternity. At the same time, the agenda of the Trump Administration is nothing new, as Hernandez (2008) shows: “as a critical enforcement practice within the history of racialization and criminalization of nonwhite immigrants in the US, noncitizen detention pursuant to the deportation of immigrants has been utilized throughout the 20th century at the nexus of national crises, xenophobia, and racism” (p. 35).

Racialization and criminalization have often been linked in American history as a way for the elites to control a narrative to help them maneuver themselves into positions of power while riding the fears and anxieties of the majority ethnicity in the nation to their political seats of authority.

This has in turn facilitated the Immigration Industrial complex—an industry that operates similarly to the prison industrial complex in that it seeks to marginalize a community based on racial factors and to stifle that ethnic community’s chances at making a decent life for itself in America (Diaz, 2011).

The Immigration Industrial Complex is now in full swing in response to the immigration of Latinos over the recent decades and the continuation of rhetoric that has aimed to “to disenfranchise these groups, coupled with the rhetoric that evolved from ‘alien’ to ‘criminal alien,’”—which is an evolution that can easily be seen in the speeches of Trump and the Trump Administration (Diaz, 2011, p. 35). Moreover, supporters of the Administration (which is currently at roughly half the U.S.

populace, approve of the tough stance against immigration that Trump has displayed: they want more protections along the border, they want troops there, they want a wall, and they want the waves of immigration from Mexico to stop. They want to have sole possession of the American Dream and do not wish to grant access to it to anyone else.

They argue that a nation has a right to defend its borders and that this defense is not a racist position or objective but rather one that seeks simply to enforce the law. The law is used as the foundation or basis of the action, though race certainly and clearly plays a part in it. The law is conflated with arguably racist outlooks, which are deeply rooted in the racist doctrines of the American colonies.

The concept of Manifest Destiny (America’s God-given right to take over everything), the early 20th century focus on eugenics, the Jim Crow laws that went into effect following the abolition of slavery, Operation Wetback—all of these instances are evidence of the racist character of the American outlook.

When such an outlook is essentially written into the character of the law, the end result is a presidential administration that seeks to enforce the law and win support from his political base by appealing to the worries of that base—the idea that their future is in jeopardy as a result of unchecked immigration.

It is the pitting of one group of people against an another—and as the group of people with all the power is the one targeting the minority group, the outcome is to be expected: deportation arrests will continue to rise and a statement will be made. How that statement will impact the future of race relations in America is unlikely to be positive, but such concerns are not.