Daniel Kanstroom - The New Deportations Delirium: Interdisciplinary Responses

CITIZENSHIP AND MIGRATION IN THE AMERICAS

General Editor: Ediberto Romn

Tierra y Libertad: Land, Liberty, and Latino Housing

Steven W. Bender

No Undocumented Child Left Behind: Plyler v. Doe and the Education of Undocumented Schoolchildren

Michael A. Olivas

Marginal Workers: How Legal Fault Lines Divide Workers and Leave Them without Protection

Ruben J. Garcia

Run for the Border: Vice and Virtue in U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings

Steven W. Bender

Those Damned Immigrants: Americas Hysteria over Undocumented Immigration

Ediberto Romn

Strange Neighbors: The Role of States in Immigration Policy

Carissa Hessick and Gabriel G. Chin

Revoking Citizenship: Expatriation Policies in America from the Colonial Era to the War on Terror

Ben Herzog

Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

The New Deportations Delirium: Interdisciplinary Responses

Daniel Kanstroom and M. Brinton Lykes

Edited by Daniel Kanstroom and M. Brinton Lykes

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

2015 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The new deportations delirium : interdisciplinary responses / Edited by Daniel Kanstroom and M. Brinton Lykes.

pages cm. (Citizenship and migration in the Americas)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4798-6867-4 (cl : alk. paper)

1. DeportationUnited States. 2. Detention of personsUnited States. 3. Illegal aliensUnited States. 4. Emigration and immigration lawUnited States. I. Kanstroom, Dan, editor. II. Lykes, M. Brinton, 1949 editor.

KF4842. N49 2015

364.68dc23 2015027831

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Also available as an ebook

For my mother, who still lives in my memory and in my heart. And for Julie, Emily, Hannah, and Harper, who remind me every day how lucky I am.

D.K.

For the migrants forced to leave home with whom I have been privileged to walk and talk as they struggle for a better life for themselves and their families both here and in their countries of origin. And for Cathy, whose life journey continues to challenge, inspire, and nurture me.

M.B.L.

Luis Argueta

Daniel Kanstroom and M. Brinton Lykes

David B. Thronson

Dora B. Schriro

Denise Noonan Slavin and Dana Leigh Marks

Ali Noorani, Brittney Nystrom, and Maurice Belanger

Jessica Chicco and Elaine P. Congress

Kalina M. Brabeck, Katherine Porterfield, and Maryanne Loughry

M. Brinton Lykes, Erin Sibley, Kalina M. Brabeck, Cristina Hunter, and Yliana Johansen-Mndez

Katie Dingeman-Cerda and Rubn G. Rumbaut

This book has been a labor of love that has required a lot of both. We have shared equally in the editorial task and in developing the interdisciplinary framework for this volume. A work of this breadth and scopeyears in the making against an ever-shifting backdrop of political, legal, and cultural changesalso inevitably demands help from many sources. We have been extremely fortunate to have had such help from too many people to name, especially all those who attended the interdisciplinary conference at Boston College in 2010 that first spawned the idea for such a work. Still, we wish to thank a few stalwarts, even as we apologize to others for not naming them specifically. We hope that they know how much we have appreciated their help and support. For collegiality, logistical support, and various types of assistance and inspiration, we particularly wish to thank David Hollenbach, SJ, Donald Hafner, Anjani Datla, Timothy Karcz, Jessica Chicco, and Rachel Rosenbloom, as well as our Guatemala-based colleagues: Ana Maria Alvarez Lpez, Ricardo Falla, SJ, Jos Daniel Chich Gonzlez, Luisa Hernndez Simaj, and Megan Thomas. We thank the Boston College graduate and undergraduate students who contributed to this volume in multiple ways, including especially Erzulie Coquillon, Kristin Gordon, Rachel Hershberg, and Jacqueline Sims. We also thank Deans George Brown, Vincent Rougeau, and Maureen Kenny for financial and other forms of support.

We are very grateful to Ediberto Romn and Debbie Gershenowitz for early support, guidance, and ideas. We also very much appreciate the assistance of Clara Platter, our current editor at NYU Press, for staying with the project and seeing it through to completion with us. Our reviewers were particularly helpful and thorough in bringing various complexities to our attention. Their careful reading improved the book tremendously. Special thanks, too, to Constance Grady for helping with uncountable details.

Finally, we are deeply grateful to all of the contributors to this volume for their patience, thoughtfulness, enthusiasm, generosity of spirit, and willingness to take the leap into interdisciplinary collaboration. We hope they agree that their efforts have been synergistic and have improved our collective understanding of the nature of the deportation system. As the book goes to press we (along with millions of noncitizens) seek to decipher President Obamas executive action while the U.S. Congress remains unableor unwillingto compromise on long-overdue comprehensive immigration reform. We hope that this volume helps policymakers to envision more imaginative and more humane responses to the excesses and unnecessary cruelties that have been visited upon millions of people during what we believe history will view as a tragically flawed deportation experiment.

Luis Argueta

When approximately 900 heavily armed agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entered Agriprocessors, Inc., the largest kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in the country, on May 12, 2008, and arrested 389 undocumented workers, I was in a different place, in a different time. I was living in New York City directing four episodes for We Are New York, a TV series geared toward recently arrived immigrants in the city. I didnt pay much attention to the event then. However, about a month later, on July 11, I read Julia Prestons article on the front page of the New York Times, in which she discussed Erik Camayd-Freixass essay about his work as an interpreter in the post-raid Postville context. Camayd-Freixas and 12 other interpreters were hired by the federal government to assist in the legal proceedings following the raid. After reading Prestons article, I went to the link and read Camayd-Freixass personal account of his experiences interpreting after what he called the largest ICE raid in US history and I said: Everybody who believes in democracy, everybody in this country, should read this essay. I immediately contacted Camayd-Freixas and asked him about the rights to publish his essay in Spanish. I then contacted my friend and colleague, Raul Figueroa Sarti, founder and editor-in-chief of F&G Editores, and asked him: If I get the rights to this essay will you publish it? Both Camayd-Freixas and Figueroa Sarti agreed and that essay became book #8 in F&Gs series,