About this Event
Join our open forum on immigration enforcement in the US and the racialization and criminalization of Latine communities, featuring Dr. David Hernández (Latina/o Studies and Critical Race and Political Economy, Mt. Holyoke) and an NYC-based organizer. Dr. Hernández will situate the present within the longer history of US immigration detention and deportation. We will then hear from our organizer about how immigration enforcement is unfolding in NYC and strategies being developed to counter it. Brief presentations will be followed by a Q&A, during which attendees can ask questions and voice their concerns.
David Hernández will discuss the broad history of immigration enforcement to help situate the current administration’s overreach and authoritarianism in its anti-immigrant operations. Prior to Trump 2.0, the history of immigration enforcement is generally one of greater freedom achieved over time and progressive reforms of older anti-immigrant social policies. The government eventually did away with Chinese Exclusion, overturned with white racial prerequisites for acquiring citizenship, and revoked racist quotas for entry. Simultaneously, however, since the 1890s, we have witnessed—and are witnessing city streets, workplaces, and homes throughout the country—a long-term consolidation of enforcement powers in the areas of apprehension, detention, and deportation. That is, where social policies have become more inclusive, the enforcement apparatus has become more powerful and punitive. The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, and its particular brand or racial malice, is simultaneously extraordinary and also part of a tradition of racialized xenophobia. David Hernández is Associate Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and Co-Chair of the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. He completed his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley. His research focuses on immigration enforcement, with an emphasis on the U.S. detention regime. He is completing a book on this institution titled Alien Incarcerations: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship. He is also the co-editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press 2016). Other work has appeared in journals such as Border-Lines, Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, the Radical History Review, Journal of Race and Policy, Latina/o Studies, and NACLA: Report on the Americas.
Readings by Dr. Hernández will be precirculated to registrants should they wish to learn more about his work and the US immigration detention regime.
This event is part of a year-long program that CSSD has been organizing, , which explores the crises of disciplinary enforcement at home and abroad.
Photo credit: Philip Lindsey, Chicago Reader
English with Spanish Translation.
In partnership with the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of Ethnicty and Race at Columbia University.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Recirculation, a project of Word Up, 876 Riverside Drive, New York, United States
USD 0.00
