Relationships between Race and Justice in ImmigrationImmigrations 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?...
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…
