Laura is a transgender woman who was granted asylee status by the United States in 2004 because of the extreme abuse and harassment she endured by the Colombian government due to her gender identity and sexual orientation. In 2008, she got into an abusive relationship and called the police. When they arrived, her abuser told the police that she assaulted him first and that she had a knife. The police asked her if this was true and then for her ID. They then asked her why she had an “M” gender marker on her passport. She told them she was a transgender woman. They arrested her and charged her with felony assault. At her arraignment, she took a plea to misdemeanor assault because she feared abuse in jail. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) identified Laura while in Rikers and she is currently fighting her deportation.

Over the past ten years, for immigrants like Laura, contact with police has increasingly become an entry point into the deportation pipeline. In 2010, the US federal government was rapidly moving forward with Secure Communities, a deportation program under which fingerprints and information that police collect at arrest are automatically shared with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE. For ICE, Secure Communities means the ability to ask local law enforcement to hold and turn over any immigrant arrested across the country, a key tactic to meet mass deportation goals.

The federal government justifies programs such as Secure Communities as necessary for national security and public safety. Instead, such programs place many at risk, including survivors of violence and trafficking that they claim to protect even as their entrenched narratives of “good” versus “bad” immigrants exclude many of them. This increased risk of deportation due to contact with police, and the need to combat such narratives, drove Marisol Arriaga, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society, and me, an organizer at the Immigrant Defense Project, to form Anti-violence Advocates against Deportation (AVA) in 2011 as a subcommittee of the New York State Working Group against Deportation’s statewide campaign to end Secure Communities.[ ]

Under AVA, we brought together a wide range of advocates for intimate partner and domestic violence survivors, LGBTQ people, youth, sex workers, labor, and sex-trafficking survivors. Some were based in organizations that respond to violence in ways that intentionally do not involve the police, while others worked in mainstream organizations that support clients who must navigate the criminal legal system to receive services and immigration benefits. This group held a diverse range of visions and perspectives on solutions to combat interpersonal violence.[ ] In this article, I discuss a political moment where the fight to end increasing police involvement in deportation created an opportunity for anti-violence advocates with varied approaches to unite against the ascendency of a hierarchy of “worthy” and “unworthy” immigrants based on criminal history, the escalation of the idea of inherent criminality, and the legitimization of the expanded role of police to fuel the deportation state.

These practices and ideologies have only intensified under Donald J. Trump’s presidency. [ ] His virulent anti-immigrant agenda, widespread human rights violations, and racist fearmongering have become a regular feature of the US political landscape, as has his repeated invocation of the threat of immigrant criminality.[ ] What makes Trump’s ethnonationalist agenda particularly dangerous is the fact that not only has he inherited the world’s largest exclusion and deportation apparatus and a robust police-to-deportation pipeline, but also the widely held consensus that the borders must be “secure” and that immigrants with criminal convictions are a worthy “national security” target.[ ] The threat to survivors of violence has not abated – in fact, one of the first high-profile cases of apprehension of an undocumented immigrant under the Trump administration involved a Latina transgender woman, Irvin Gonzalez, who ICE agents picked up in a courthouse after she sought an order of protection against her abusive boyfriend, just days after Trump issued an executive order that expanded the categories of immigrants who are priorities for enforcement and deportation.[ ] In this article, I focus on how the material and ideological tools that fuel the deportation state were expanded and refined as advocates and organizers contested the merger of local policing and deportation under Barack Obama’s administration. Through the course of this struggle, a particular form of criminalization solidified, which has significantly shaped the terms by which we continue to fight the deportation state today.

The Focus on the “Criminal Alien”: A Condensed History

Committed to passing immigration reform, President Obama embraced the bipartisan immigration reform framework under which a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents is coupled with more punitive border and interior policing – placating the Right with “tough on crime” and “rule of law” rhetoric and achieving record levels of deportation.[ ] To create political space to legalize noncriminalized undocumented migrants, Obama distinguished between good and undesirable immigrants using one-dimensional racialized archetypes and by emphasizing that undocumented immigrants must be held accountable for any criminalized conduct before gaining lawful status. [ ] Control of “criminal elements” has long been evoked as a rationale for border policing, but a hallmark of the Obama administration was the rhetorical and material escalation of the criminalization of immigrants, including long-time residents with legal status. [ ] The Obama administration broadened the DHS’s mission to identify and remove “criminal aliens who pose a threat to public safety,” and set performance goals to deport over 210,000 “criminal aliens” per year. [ ]

Representations of “dangerous outsiders” or “the enemy within” have been an integral part of nation-building and defining belonging in the United States since its settlement. [ ] Immigration laws have historically played a key role in social control and in reinforcing white supremacy, capitalism, heteronormativity, and the threat of “criminal” others who might destabilize the social order. Those excluded have included Chinese women profiled as “prostitutes”; those deemed likely to become a “public charge” (such as pregnant unmarried women); and those who might be queer (until 1990). Mass expulsion has greatly relied on drug deportation provisions rooted in anti-Black and anti-Mexican racism. [ ] In the 1970s, as US policies overseas fueled a significant increase in unauthorized migration to the United States – particularly from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean – public officials railed against it with language that evoked a nation under siege. For the next two decades, the threat of “illegal” immigrants dominated the political conversation, provoking what has become a permanent state of emergency and justifying a continual and massive investment in border and interior “security.”[ ] Dominant themes included the dovetailing of the war on drugs and border policing, unauthorized migrants’ purported threat to the economy and social services, and a growing emphasis by anti-immigrant organizations’ growing emphasis on ethnocultural homogeneity. [ ]

In the mid-1980s, the nation – focused on crime, welfare, and immigration – became increasingly punitive and Congress increasingly fixated on immigrant “criminality,” including measures to make it easier to remove “criminal aliens.” [ ] The federal government set up what is now the Criminal Alien Program to deport immigrants in jails and prisons nationwide. [ ]

This punitive approach intensified during the 1990s. The Clinton administration responded to Haitian and Cuban refugees with detention and deterrence, for example, and launched Operation Gatekeeper, the centerpiece of its expanded militarization of the United States-Mexico border. [ ] Meanwhile, a 1994 ballot initiative in California, Proposition 187, aimed to bar undocumented immigrants from public education, health care, and other services, and helped to propel anti-immigrant sentiment nationally. [ ]

Embracing a “tough on crime” stance, in 1996 Clinton signed legislation that fueled criminalization, including the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). These laws increased border policing, enhanced penalties for unauthorized entry, and established a framework for police collaboration with immigration officials. They made it much harder for immigrants to obtain legal status and much easier for the government to deport even long-time permanent residents by vastly expanding the criminal offenses that trigger deportation and by severely limiting due process. [ ]

Despite the severity of these laws, it became clear that the only way to “rid the country of criminal aliens” would be with “an enormous increase in resources or a significant realignment of inter-governmental responsibilities.”[ ] G.W. Bush’s post-9/11 war on terror realized this with the 2003 founding of the Department of Homeland Security, “the largest, most important restructuring of the federal government since the end of World War II,” which created “the most militarized federal entity after the Pentagon.” [ ] Merging the mission of counterterrorism and immigration control, DHS made policing immigrants – with an initial focus on Muslims and undocumented workers – a central function of the national security state and quickly set goals to identify, arrest, and deport “all removable aliens.” [ ]

Rather than challenge the homeland security state, Obama oversaw the most massive policing, surveillance, and sustained deportation of immigrants in US history.[ ] Obama turbocharged the DHS, increased its budget by 300 per cent, and so effectuated the largest number of deportations in United States history.[ ] Local policing and ICE became more entangled than ever. And the federal prosecutions of migrants were 52 per cent of all federal prosecutions in 2016, up from 28 per cent in 2004. [ ]

By legitimating immigration control as part of the war on terror, Obama escalated a moral panic that places some of the most vulnerable and marginalized migrants in the crosshairs – including asylum seekers and anyone who comes into contact with the police, including survivors. [ ] Despite consistently declining crime rates since the 1990s, the DHS justifies large-scale punishment by employing time-tested carceral logics that elevate the purported threat of “criminal aliens”. As Stuart Hall highlights regarding the fear of crime and the apparatus of social control, “Perhaps the most immediately troubling feature is the clear discrepancy between the scale of the ‘threat’ … and the scale of the measures taken to prevent and contain it.” [ ] In addition to escalating criminalization, this has resulted in increasing fear and destabilization, which make survivors afraid to seek help as the risk of being placed into deportation proceedings increases. [ ]

Parallel and Intersecting Pathways: Secure Communities and the Anti-violence and Immigrant Rights Movements

For survivors of family and interpersonal violence, the punitive immigration laws of the 1996, namely the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, intersected with other Clinton-era laws that made them more vulnerable to state violence, criminalization, and deportation.

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (the crime bill) of 1994 expanded funding for police and prisons and created new federal capital crimes and harsh mandatory minimum sentences. [ ] The Violence against Women Act passed as part of that crime bill after decades of grassroots advocacy for state recognition of the harms of family violence.[ ] The act created different forms of immigration relief for survivors of gendered violence, including allowing undocumented people married to US citizens or green-card holders to petition for legal status without the involvement or knowledge of their abusive spouse. It also enabled survivors of violence, including trafficking offenses, to petition for immigration status provided they cooperate with law enforcement. The Violence against Women Act thus gave policing and punitive sentencing a bigger role in domestic and other sites of violence, requiring survivors to navigate a discriminatory criminal legal system to receive recognition as “victims” since “restraining orders, convictions and imprisonment of perpetrators of family violence have become routine ways of addressing women’s needs for personal safety and the pathway for women to escape interpersonal violence.” [ ] Anti-violence advocates working with immigrant women and women of color had to grapple with a context in which “race, class, gender identity, and immigration status leave certain women more vulnerable to violence and that greater criminalization often places these same women at risk of state violence.”[ ] As attorney Lee-Ann Wang puts it, “narratives of pure and universal victimhood not only erased women of color, indigenous, queer, and migrants from being ‘worthy’ of legal protection, they marked them and their communities as perpetrators and threats to ‘public safety.’”[ ] In other words, as the state advanced immigration policing regimes premised on criminalization and deportation in conjunction with promoting policing and prisons as a primary solution to domestic violence, immigrant survivors unable to fit into the “good victim” trope became more vulnerable to state violence, criminalization, and deportation.[ ] As Andrea J. Ritchie, author of Invisible No More and AVA participant, notes:

The problem is that who is perceived to be a legitimate “victim” for the purpose of immigration remedies or other legal remedies is very much raced, gendered, and rooted in the politics of respectability. In spite of experiencing years of abuse at the hands of her husband before accidentally shooting him with a gun he had used to terrorize her countless times, Liyah Birru – a Black Ethiopian migrant not recognized as a “victim” entitled to remedies at law – is now facing deportation, rather than being afforded immigration remedies created precisely for people in her situation. She is one among thousands of survivors of violence who are excluded from the “victim” category because they are migrants, Black, women of color, trans or gender nonconforming, have prior convictions, are Muslim, were born in disfavored countries, or refuse or are unable to cease involvement in the sex trades or other criminalized economies.[ ]

Under Obama, interior deportations reached a historic high largely due to the unprecedented entanglement of the DHS, FBI, and local police – notably, the aggressive implementation Secure Communities in 2009.[ ] Secure Communities effectively creates an alert system for ICE in every police precinct as fingerprint data taken by law enforcement at booking is automatically shared with the DHS via the FBI.[ ] ICE then decides whether to ask police to hold the individual after they are released from criminal custody (via a “detainer”) or to notify ICE prior to the individual’s release.[ ] Secure Communities thus creates a grave dilemma for those who work with survivors of violence. Since survivors must often involve police to be recognized as “victims” by the state, ICE’s presence in local law enforcement increases their risk of detention and deportation. Forcing or encouraging involvement with the criminal legal system now poses an increased risk under Secure Communities, as was the case for Clara, a survivor who avoided being turned over to ICE because of the quick advocacy of her attorney:

Clara has been physically, sexually, emotionally and verbally abused by her former U.S. citizen boyfriend. He hired someone to break into her home to intimidate her and a private investigator to track her activities. Clara is the cooperating witness in two criminal cases pending against him and the petitioner in a pending family court order of protection case. The abuser’s mother, in retaliation, falsely accused Clara of credit card fraud. Despite Clara’s efforts to report her abuser and to seek protection, the police arrested her without investigation based on the mother’s allegation. At booking, the police sent her fingerprints to the ICE database under S-Comm [Secure Communities]. ICE identified her as deportable as she overstayed her visa and lodged a hold request against her. At arraignment, Clara was eligible to post bail but the judge did not permit her to do so because of the hold request. Clara was frantic as she has a young child and was emotionally and physically at her breaking point. Fortunately, unlike so many others, she had a legal advocate when this retaliatory arrest happened who presented ample evidence of the violent history in the relationship to get the hold request lifted. Many survivors do not have evidence or access to suitable legal resources.

This created a dilemma for service providers who work with immigrant survivors, and places survivors further beyond safety. As AVA member Sakhi for South Asian Women states, “If the NYPD offers ICE access to police facilities, it’s our obligation to inform non-citizen survivors that the risk of calling the police also comes with the risk of deportation … S-Comm undermines our work to stop interpersonal violence among already marginalized non-citizen communities.” [ ]

Soniya Munshi, a long-time anti-violence organizer and scholar, highlights the dangerous intersections of expanding police involvement in the immigration policing machinery and a “carceral feminist” approach to ending gender violence that relies on policing, prosecution, and punishment.[ ] She explains: “Frontline staff of domestic violence organizations working with a wide range of survivors were all too familiar with the negative impact of policing, and the inability of survivors to access services because of a criminal record. And they knew all too well that not all ‘victims’ were treated equally by the state, that survivor vulnerability to state violence is linked to race, class, gender conformity, language skills, and immigration status. AVA created an opportunity for these advocates to push back against the limits of this carceral approach” as part of resistance to the increasing criminalization of immigration policing. [ ]

AVA members rooted their advocacy in fighting for the rights of all survivors and highlight the reality that immigrant survivors are easy targets for ICE as many were at risk of arrest and had prior convictions. In taking this approach, AVA departs from the mainstream domestic violence movement tendency to distinguish and protect “innocent survivors” and to apply carceral logics against those deemed unworthy. Many survivors are arrested due to policies under which police arrest both parties in a domestic dispute, or due to abusers’ manipulation of the criminal legal system.[ ] Women who are marginalized based on identity, “such as queers, immigrants, women of color, trans women, or even women who are perceived as loud or aggressive, often do not fit preconceived notions of abuse victims and are thus arrested.”[ ] Survivors are often arrested for activities that may not readily appear to stem from their abuse, such as drug possession, shoplifting, or prostitution. Also, people face enormous pressure to accept pleas and queer people, especially those who are transgender, often face additional pressure out of fear of gender-related abuse while incarcerated, as an AVA participant illustrates:

The NYPD frequently targeted Tracey, an undocumented transgender woman from Trinidad, while she was living on the Upper West Side. The police profiled her as a sex worker and constantly harassed her outside of her home. They often charged her with loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution … Because of this harassment, Tracey was arrested approximately 30 times in a two-year period. Tracey pled to many of the charges because she could not bear the violence she experienced inside the men’s jail where she previously had been physically assaulted. [ ]

AVA coalition members were also extremely concerned with the increased vulnerability that Secure Communities creates due to the racial, class, and gender biases in policing and the frequent arrests of people of color through broken windows policing like that Tracey experienced, based on a debunked theory that police should arrest, surveil, and contain those who create “disorder” to prevent more “serious” offenses. Broken windows policing sweeps women and gender nonconforming people of color – including street vendors, homeless women, queer and trans people, and people targeted in policing of street-based prostitution – into criminalizing nets.[ ] Policing practices continue to be informed by racialized depictions of immigrant women – for example, Asian women as sex workers or traffickers, Latinas as gang members and drug runners, and South Asian and Muslim women as “terrorists.”[ ] AVA members the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and the Sex Workers Project speak to how women of color, LGBTQ youth, and transgender women were routinely profiled as sex workers and harassed and abused by police, and how a wide range of “quality of life” offenses – such as not paying a bus fare, turnstile jumping, shoplifting, drug possession, and prostitution – can trigger deportation or limit survivors’ ability to obtain immigration status. [ ]

Pooja Gehi, who participated in AVA with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, reflects: “We wanted safety – but safety for our communities was not possible through expanding the role of the state and its ability to criminalize certain bodies. People, especially Black and Brown bodies, cis women and trans women of color, have long been profiled by police and targeted for survival ‘crimes’ based on how they are presenting and for being poor. We came together to challenge the ideas that some people are disposable and fight against the increasing role of law enforcement in the deportation machine.” [ ]

“Priority Enforcement” and “Good” versus “Bad” Immigrants

Promises of immigration reform and a record-breaking number of deportations created fertile soil for organizing during the Obama era.[ ] Opposition to Secure Communities grew quickly and campaigns spread nationally. [ ] While AVA and others highlighted the repercussions of merging racist policing practices with the deportation system, others focused on the program’s focus on “noncriminals” and interference with policing. Many pointed to the well-documented problems of discriminatory policing practices under 287(g) programs, in which police are deputized to act as immigration agents.[ ] Nationally, organizations such as ASISTA highlighted the negative impacts on immigrant survivors of violence.[ ] Even some law enforcement officials joined in opposition. [ ]

The Obama administration was sensitive to criticisms that using local police as a “force multiplier” would fuse racist and discriminatory policing practices with immigration policing.[ ] It was not unresponsive to the harmful impacts of policing on Black and brown communities or to the need to reverse the harms of the discriminatory and excessively punitive criminal legal system.[ ] But rather than acknowledge the dilemmas, the administration asserted that there was no bias as ICE relies “purely” on biometrics sharing and only goes after people “who have been arrested in the first place.” [ ] As mainstream opposition increasingly latched onto the critique that Secure Communities was a dragnet targeting the “wrong” immigrants, the administration created a prioritization hierarchy of people who present “public safety” threats, which increasingly vilified those with criminal convictions. [ ]

Starting in June 2010, ICE director John Morton issued a series of memos that classified immigrants with a broad range of criminal convictions as “a risk to public safety” and therefore the highest enforcement priority.[ ] The prioritization was not effectively practiced, as those deported as “criminal aliens” – an unfixed term with no legal definition – included people who were arrested but not convicted, undocumented people with traffic offenses, and people solely prosecuted for immigration violations.[ ] Because the agency aimed to reach deportation quotas of “criminal aliens”, ICE relied on an expansive classification of who qualified. [ ]

The Obama administration increasingly relied on carceral logics to justify its immigration agenda, including that punitive preventive measures against people with criminal convictions would protect the broader public against potential violence. ICE waged a public campaign to demonize immigrants with criminal records, including directing all field offices to identify the “most egregious criminal” targeted for deportation for weekly write-ups.[ ] ICE conducted highly publicized raids to target people with criminal convictions in a deliberate move away from the workplace raids under G.W. Bush.[ ] In one such sweep in 2012, ICE arrested 3,100 people over six days. Morton stated: “When ICE arrests and removes [deports] a particular offender, the rate of recidivism for that particular offender drops to zero … Public safety is significantly improved by deporting those involved in crime.”[ ] In this way, ICE drew from the rationale for mass imprisonment, invoked the threat of recidivism, and purported to “solve social problems by extensively and repeatedly removing people from disordered, deindustrialized milieus and deporting them somewhere else.” [ ]

ICE’s characterizations and treatment of immigrants with criminal convictions parallels the hypothesis of broken windows policing: that certain people, namely low-income and homeless people, youth, women, and people of color, LGBTQ, and gender nonconforming people, produce “social disorder” and are “either already criminals, or simply criminals in the making.”[ ] This logic – and that of the criminalization that propels mass deportation – not only justifies more surveillance and intrusion into the lives of those regarded as threats, but also fuels a vengefulness against those who are already marginalized, deeming them unworthy of compassion, while obscuring the underlying function of these policing practices. [ ]

AVA participants were challenging criminalizing narratives in the politics of immigration and in the rhetoric of the anti-violence movement that sought to create exceptions to ICE policies for “victims” – resisting the carceral logics promoted by both. Ritchie explains:

The thing about criminalization is that it is a process that designates certain people as criminal rather than certain conduct. And once someone is part of a criminalized group – migrants, Indigenous people, Black people, trans and gender nonconforming people – then the state not only refuses them protection but becomes a primary perpetrator of violence against them. To the extent that anti-violence movements buy into and advance that process, they are automatically consigning criminalized survivors of violence to further violence and criminalization at the hands of the state in the name of elusive protection for the few.[ ]

Resistance to Secure Communities

ICE initially promoted Secure Communities to states as a voluntary program. In spring 2011, advocates convinced the governors of Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts to halt their implementation of Secure Communities.[ ] As opposition grew, the DHS announced the program would be mandatory in 2012.[ ] Resistance pivoted to local efforts to prevent people in police custody from being turned over to ICE. Organizers advocated for policies that would direct local law enforcement to not honor ICE detainer requests once they were identified through Secure Communities.[ ] Influenced by the politics of prioritization and criminalization, municipalities developing detainer legislation began to consider exceptions allowing law enforcement to honor ICE detainers for people deemed to be disposable, in most cases based on convictions for particular criminal offenses. This set the stage for the next phase of the fight as AVA and others, led by the ICE Out of Rikers Campaign, advocated against carveouts and for more expansive ICE detainer policies in New York City.

AVA learned that New York City administration initially reached out to larger domestic violence organizations for suggestions on how to create a carveout to protect “victims,” as well as which offenses to include on the list dictating who the city would turn over to ICE. AVA problematized and complicated the notion that carveouts protect survivors, and disrupted the worthy/unworthy binary within mainstream domestic violence organizations and New York City leadership. As Soniya Munshi reflects on the anti-violence movement’s history of carveouts:

The state’s recognition of gender-based violence in VAWA [Violence against Women Act] and in the “welfare reform” of the 1990s created carve outs and remedies to protect survivors of violence, but only those who were legible to the state because they fit its criteria of a “good” survivor. Anti-violence advocates have had to struggle with recognizing what is sacrificed for protecting some of the vulnerable at the cost of the others. The City had offered a carve out for some survivors of domestic violence as a compromise to Secure Communities, and AVA came together to resist it. Fighting against the idea of carve outs is what made AVA exceptional. [ ]

As the AVA points of unity state: “We push back against anti-violence responses that privilege the rights of some at the expense of others. Privileging the ‘good’ or ‘innocent’ immigrant from the ‘bad’ or ‘criminal’ immigrant dehumanizes and minimizes the complexities of people’s lives. It also perpetuates the scapegoating of immigrants and fuels policies that justify the mass deportation of those who are deemed less worthy of rights.”[ ]

AVA noted how many survivors would be regarded as priority targets under Secure Communities due to their criminal histories and likelihood of being arrested for offenses like “assault” under mandatory arrest policies, and pushed back against the notion that survivors had to fit a narrow ideal of a victim to be considered worthy. In press statements and testimony, AVA highlighted how the state does not provide safety equally across the categories of race, class, gender, and immigration status, and the need to center the agency of women and LGBTQ survivors of violence to seek their own solutions to violence. [ ]

Ritchie notes how AVA pushed for alternatives to mainstream notions of who was worthy of protection:

AVA was a critical political space to be able to challenge narratives around survivors of trafficking (“worthy”) and migrants who were facing policing and criminalization for trading sex to survive (“unworthy”), survivors of domestic violence who had no prior criminal record (“worthy”) and those who had been criminalized for defending themselves or engaging in other criminalized survival actions (“unworthy”), and the whole “felons vs. families” meta-narrative. We were able to come together as a unified front to push back on these narratives within the larger mainstream immigrant rights and domestic violence movements and against legislators who seemed to only be willing to offer resistance and legislative relief on behalf of people who came close to sainthood. [ ]

In 2014, New York City passed a bill that significantly restricted the circumstances under which it would honor an ICE detainer, but one that contains carveouts that the administration insisted were necessary to make the bill politically viable. Under the law, in order for the city to comply with a detainer request, ICE must provide a judicial warrant and the person must have been convicted of a “violent or serious crime” (as defined in the law) within the last five years.[ ] In other words, if ICE does not have a judicial warrant, the NYPD or the Department of Corrections are not authorized to honor an ICE detainer even if the person has been convicted of one of the offenses enumerated in the law. AVA decided to support the judicial warrant requirement, while making clear that it did not support the carveouts and that AVA members would continue to support policies that would protect the rights of all.

Since the bill was enacted, the strong judicial warrants requirements have ensured that very few ICE detainers have been honored by the NYPD and the Department of Corrections and that thousands of New Yorkers have been protected from being turned over to ICE. [ ] Yet the carveouts continue to have damaging political consequences. While the city still maintains a policy of not honoring the vast majority of detainers, the mayor’s office unsuccessfully tried to apply the carveouts to limit entitlement to a city program offering universal representation for New Yorkers in immigration detention, and more recently has tried to deny provision of legal services altogether based on that list. [ ]

Although AVA and the broader coalition did not win the fight to exclude carveouts, its advocacy upholding the rights of all immigrants, regardless of criminal history, helped to shift the broader political conversation and develop the analysis and commitment of allies in the city council who continue to oppose carveouts.

Conclusion

The fight against Secure Communities illustrates how the politics of compassion toward good immigrants hardened socioterritorial boundaries against those deemed undesirable, including survivors of violence. As has been the case elsewhere in the world, the Obama administration’s border-making cloaked in humanitarianism helped to “[reproduce] inequalities and racial, gendered, and geopolitical hierarchies.”[ ] However, the presence of compassion also afforded a political space for advocates like AVA to challenge carceral solutions and the criminalization of immigrants through the lens of the experiences of those carceral policies claim to protect.

Obama did not invent the bipartisan immigration control framework, but by centering carceral logics as a key justification for the homeland security state, his administration reproduced and strengthened it. Trump’s virulent ethnonationalist agenda also draws its strength from a deep-rooted racialized “othering” that operates comfortably within the same framework – that United States borders must be secure, whether through a physical wall or a smart wall, and that there cannot be legal inclusion for those deemed good without the punishment and expulsion of those deemed undesirable.

The change in the political terrain since the 2016 election has led to an abundance of challenges and a shift in tactics for many. Yet, the Trump administration’s extreme rhetoric also provides openings, including increasing sensitivity to the brutality and inhumanity of the immigration control system. For example, calls to abolish ICE that have percolated from the Left to the mainstream create space to challenge the logics that underlie the bipartisan consensus around homeland security that has prioritized militarism and an increasingly violent regime of noncitizen and border policing while diverting massive resources from housing, education, employment, health care, and other essential social programs. [ ]

As we continue to fight the extreme manifestations of the immigration control regime and the othering that accompanies them, we must also unmask the inherently violent nature of what underlies them – the state’s commitment to maintain and expand an extremely punitive deportation apparatus and to exclude those that have been deemed to be disposable, including criminalized survivors of violence the system claims to protect – and to advocate for the recognition and realization of human rights for all, rooted in the realities of the most vulnerable members of our communities.