Policies, Language, and the Stripping of Freedoms

What? Key points in this article that strike you as crucial to understanding the issues we are still facing.

This article charts the course of two strippings of freedoms: that of black citizens and that of Latino immigrants. Hernández notes how the two processes are intertwined throughout history, citing Frederick Douglass to hint that, perhaps, they are just one process: that of exclusion and marginalization in order to uphold what Hernández identifies as a caste system. That of stripping people of their rights and benefits, so much so that convicted citizens become aliens, and all immigrants become automatically criminalized and thus, “illegal.” Both are effectively barred from accessing or experiencing the benefits of American citizenship. She charts how this “increasingly tangled world of exclusion” (55) became so primarily through the rise of mass incarceration and the criminalization of Latino immigrants. She additionally explains, however, how it is centuries in the making.

“In the jails and prisons of the Golden State, the crossed paths of felons and illegals clarify the meaning of mass incarceration and immigration control. For the Mexicanized caste of illegals, the arrival in US jails and prisons confirms that the US immigration control system is busy not only removing people from the United States but also in delivering them to peculiar institutions where far-reaching and racialized social, political, and economic inequities are now defined within the United States. For the African Americans who are unevenly represented among California’s convict population, the arrival of undocumented immigrants in the prison system strengthens the prison’s function as a special reserve for those without full citizenship rights in the United States” (65).

Oof.

Below are some notes on a few things that stood out to me:

This article highlighted for me, once again, how the idea of an “illegal alien” or an “illegal” person at all, was created, and is continually re-created, by increasingly restrictive immigration legislation — and not by anything real at all. The below quote illustrates this so beautifully (and painfully):

“Border Patrol officers spend their working hours literally bringing bodies to the consequential but relatively broad and abstract political category of illegal immigrant. Unauthorized immigration is a field of social activity constituted by everything from expired visas and border jumping to false statements and unemployment. The Border Patrol translates this broad field of social activity into an identifiable social reality of persons policed, apprehended, detained, and deported for violating US immigration law. Therefore, the making of the political category of the “illegal alien” an everyday reality in American life is rooted in the decisions and discretions made by the U.S. Border Patrol in the pursuit of immigration law enforcement” (58).

Policies and language have such a big effect on how we, the public, view different groups of people — this reality sinks into me in a new way each time I re-read the above quote. Cultural attitudes influenced by policy and language, in turn, have such a big effect on how people are shifted around in space. The article states that “African Americans and Latinos, together, constitute 67 percent of the total state-prison population” (64). But, it points out, things have not always been like this. “In the 1920s, African Americans comprised 7 percent of the state and federal prison population in California. During World War II, tens of thousands of African Americans migrated to the West Coast to take jobs in the region’s growing industrial sector. Still, the black presence in the California prison system did not skyrocket until deindustrialization and the War on Drugs accelerated during the early 1980s” (65). Similar to how recent cultural and legal shifts have criminalized immigrants and created the marginalized and racialized category of “Illegal Immigrant,” cultural and legal shifts in the 1980s (most prominently, the War of Drugs) led to a significant rise in criminalization of the black body, as evidenced in the mass incarceration that followed.

In a similar vein, Hernández discussed how the Mexicanization and subsequent criminalization of the concept of the immigrant was created largely by individual Border Patrol agents. In the beginning of the Border Patrol (the 1920s and 1930s), officers on the U.S.-Mexico border were hired from local border towns. They were often working-class white men who seemed to do their job from a place of fear and desperation. The federal government gave the agents no direction as to who to focus on in terms of immigration control. Should they focus on “Asians, unaccompanied minors, persons with trachoma” (58) or another one of the many categories of immigration law violators? Because of 1) the officers’ proximity to the border, 2) their experienced as working-class white men, and 3) their subsequent opinions on what’s most important, they began to focus almost exclusively on apprehending and deporting undocumented Mexican workers. This “functioned as a means of wrestling respect from agribusinessmen, demanding deference from Mexicans in general, achieving upward social mobility for their families, and/or concealing racial violence within the framework of police work” (58–60).

I assumed that it was national narratives, coming from the top, that started to Mexicanize and criminalize the concept of the immigrant. It was a surprise to find out that it was actually the geographic and socioeconomic placement of the Border Patrol officers that essentially set up these narratives (combined with the lack of management by the federal government, of course) from day one. This illustrates very well how even “everyday” people, not just people in top levels of government, are complacent in creating and upholding white supremacy. This situation is interesting as well because it shows me that those who enforce laws often have more power than those who create laws, at least in terms of how those laws affect marginalized people.

So What? Any points above or other that relate to structures (including racist narratives) that impact the community members you have been working with.

A lot came up for me, while reading, about what the criminalization of the immigrant must feel like to immigrants going through their everyday lives. It makes me think about the ESL students at Canal Alliance I’ve been working with, many of whom must feel the target on their back as they go through life trying to obey all the rules and do everything right. This, I’m thinking, must be so difficult when every tiny misdemeanor or traffic offense can be counted as a deportable offense.

Hernández writes that, with the The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, “shoplifting, passing bad checks, and drug possession all constituted aggravated felonies subject to automatic deportation proceedings” (63). By the mid-1990s, “document fraud, vehicle trafficking, and skipping bail” (63) were added to this list. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 turned a single act of “moral turpitude” into a deportable offense, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, also passed in 1996, “defined any conviction that carried a minimum sentence of one year as a deportable offense” (63).

Through the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) and Secure Communities program, Hernández adds, federal authorities can “identify undocumented immigrants throughout the country among persons detained for misdemeanors and traffic violations” (63). I imagine this worry about being stopped anytime, and what a toll that worrying would take on a person. For many, this means constant self-monitoring and constant monitoring of the laws.

Hernández makes it clear how the shift to criminalization, to looking at all immigrants as criminals, was done in a purposeful and, frankly, quite aggressive way: “To defeat the image of a poor worker crossing the border without sanction, a Border Patrol supervisor instructed officers that, ‘whenever a criminal record exists, we use the words, “criminal alien,” and when no criminal record exists, the words, “deportable alien.” I feel this change will have a psychological effect on the public and courts that will benefit the Service’” (62). Yuck.

This type of criminalization means, essentially, that immigrants are seen as guilty until proven innocent. Receipt of this can be found in how detention centers along the border, starting in the mid-1950s, “began strip-searching all detainees upon entrance to the immigrant detention facilities and detained migrants for longer periods to run criminal background checks on all deportees” (63). All of this, again, must take a major toll on the body and on the psyche. Because it’s not that a person can just “avoid doing something wrong and be fine.” It’s that, even if you’re doing nothing wrong you’re still looked at as guilty, and if an officer (police, ICE, whomever) wants you to be guilty, they’ll find a way to make it so. This sounds exhausting, and I imagine this feeling is only exacerbated by not being able to speak fluent English.

Now What? Find and discuss at least one article about how the Coronavirus pandemic is impacting prisons or even recently released people and/or ICE detention centers, and/or communities and people you have been working with.

People in jails, prisons, and detention centers are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 because they live in such close quarters with each other, with little to no personal space and shared bathrooms. Additionally, there aren’t resources available to them like there should be — mostly I’m thinking of medical care but even just soap, water, and cleaning supplies.

I’ve been thinking about the hierarchical access to resources that exists even within prisons… Harvey Weinstein somehow got access to a COVID-19 test, while so many people who need to be tested and are not rapists can’t get tested. The positive light of this diagnosis, though, is that it seems to have led the general public into starting to think about what this virus means for prisons. I’m sick of seeing his name in headlines, but maybe his name on the front pages is part of the reason why people are starting to be released from prisons across the country.

“There are more than 5,000 people on Rikers Island and the math is not complicated. Thousands of people need to be released if tragedy is to be averted. People will die. You could release about half of the people on Rikers Island if you released people who were there because they technically violated parole, meaning they missed a meeting or broke curfew or tested positive for drugs, and if you released people who were serving sentences of less than a year for low level offenses. The other half of people on Rikers Island are being held pre-trial because they couldn’t afford bail. They are legally innocent but poor. Jail could literally become a death sentence for people who didn’t have the means to buy their freedom.”

- Rebecca Kavanagh, legal analyst and criminal defense attorney

I’ve been reading about how, supposedly, ICE announced last Wednesday that it would “stop making arrests, except for those that are considered ‘mission critical,’ until after the Coronavirus crisis had passed.” Somehow I can’t imagine a world in which this would really happen. Haven’t had the chance to read more about it though.

That same New York Times article cited above also mentions that, “Civil courts and family courts are holding hearings only on important matters like child protection proceedings.”

I’ve also been thinking about what it must feel like to be a person who was on house arrest for many years, who then must be, essentially, going through many of the same feelings again right now. Blech.

Although in some cases the virus is canceling immigration hearings, ICE proceedings, and letting some inmates be released, in most other cases it is revealing structural inequity that will ultimately result in more deaths amongst vulnerable populations such as those in prisons and detention centers. It’s hard to say exactly when and how the virus is going to hit these populations, but it really doesn’t look good.