Over the past two decades, the federal government has invited local participation in immigration enforcement through Section 287(g) of the US Immigration and Nationality Act, conscripted participation through Secure Communities, relented somewhat in the later years of the Obama administration, and then moved to penalize localities that avoid enforcement under Trump. Policing Immigrants chronicles the confusion and contradiction these changes have wrought in police departments and sheriffs’ offices throughout the country, resulting in what the authors call a “multijurisdictional patchwork” of immigration enforcement approaches (p. 8). Local law enforcement officials often find themselves torn between a desire to build trust with all residents and federal policies that tell them unauthorized immigrant residents should be the target of enforcement. Meanwhile, immigrants experience not only the whiplash of changing federal policies but also the vagaries of different approaches from city to city, city to county, county to state, and even officer to officer. Policing Immigrants reveals the troubling consequences of this immigration enforcement patchwork, drawing on seven case studies of small cities, coupled with three national surveys of police chiefs and sheriffs.
At root, Policing Immigrants asks whether the 12,500 local police departments and 3,000 sheriffs’ offices nationwide can ever serve as the uncomplicated “force multiplier” the federal government desires (p. 11). The authors represent a dream team for addressing this question. Paul Lewis draws on his earlier work with Karthick Ramakrishnan, which pioneered surveys of local responses to immigrants and shaped understandings of bureaucratic incorporation. Monica Varsanyi builds on her volume Taking Local Control (2010), which provided early evidence of the immigration enforcement patchwork. Doris Marie Provine brings her earlier examinations of state-level immigration policy, as well as her work on the racialized content and consequences of criminal justice policies. Lastly, Scott Decker brings an understanding of policing practices from his extensive work on gang violence.
Drawing on this rich reservoir of knowledge, the authors begin with a compelling historical account of immigration federalism that unites previous literature, legal scholarship, and government documents to display not only a timeline of events but also the continuity between them. In doing so, it provides a crucial corrective to perceptions that the punitive turn in immigration enforcement began only under the Trump administration. This careful attention to the intricacies of evolving policies, building comprehensively on past scholarship, continues throughout the book, making it a valuable resource for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Having laid this groundwork, the book proceeds to examine three cases that reveal the peculiarities of the immigration enforcement patchwork: Mesa, Arizona; New Haven, Connecticut; and Raleigh, North Carolina. After bringing the contradictions of the patchwork to life, the authors draw on national surveys to examine the contextual and organizational factors that shape the variation. Local legislative policies on immigration (or at least law enforcement officials’ perceptions of them) are linked to local police practices. Local political ideology also shapes city and county immigration enforcement policies. More surprisingly, some key factors explaining responses in past work do not appear to influence local law enforcement. For instance, a larger immigrant population and a faster-growing Latino population are associated with, if anything, less restriction.
Although these results largely apply across cities and counties, a strength of Policing Immigrants is that it carefully differentiates between practices reported by city police chiefs and those of county sheriffs, who tend to be elected officials with greater independence and more responsibility over jails. In this vein, the authors introduce law enforcement professional associations’ commitment to community policing and demonstrate how these practices have proliferated across large and small police departments and even many sheriffs’ offices. They also show how immigration enforcement complicates community policing and almost inevitably leads to ethnic profiling.
Given the complex and in some cases surprising findings from their surveys, the authors turn back to case studies to describe the “micropolitics” (p. 10) of how immigration enforcement policies emerge in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Dodge City, Kansas; El Paso, Texas; and Salem, Oregon. Although available measures of economic dependence on immigrants did not appear to influence local responses in the surveys, in the case studies we see that economic reliance cannot be easily measured and may play a decisive role in decision making on the local level. The examination of El Paso, with its low crime rate and desire to pass “under the radar” in avoiding immigration enforcement (pp. 122–23), is particularly fascinating in light of today’s challenges at the border and Trump’s recent, erroneous comments about crime in that city.
Policing Immigrants reveals that changing federal policies, lack of guidance and oversight from national authorities, and the polarized politics of contemporary immigration policy have complicated the work of local law enforcement, sown confusion and fear among immigrants, and likely sent signals to the broader American public that immigrants are suspect and even criminal. In view of these findings, the authors conclude by arguing that immigration enforcement tasks are inconsistent with the demands of local policing.
Although the authors focus much of their attention on local immigration enforcement, interestingly, Policing Immigrants reveals that inaction or even accommodation of immigrant populations is actually quite common. In this fractious environment, many law enforcement agencies have opted to remain silent when it comes to enforcement practices, such that a nonpolicy with respect to unauthorized immigrants is more common than a stated practice. Moreover, formal and informal efforts to avoid participation in enforcement are actually more common than a stated practice of cooperation in enforcement. Nonetheless, the authors focus on enforcement because they argue that one jurisdiction’s restrictive policies reverberate beyond its borders: “restrictive localities [tend] to undermine the approaches of more receptive localities,” generating an “enforcement-oriented race to the bottom” (p. 4).
In today’s maelstrom of immigration policy news, one might worry that a book that predates Trump’s election, with surveys from 2007–10, would seem out of date. To the contrary, the book effectively contextualizes questions of immigration enforcement and the complexities of federalism that have only become more relevant under Trump. Indeed, if there is anything to criticize in Policing Immigrants, it is that the reader is left wanting more in terms of policy recommendations given the authors’ rich findings and the current urgency of these questions.
Since the book’s publication in 2016, many of its findings have been corroborated and expanded on in more recent work. In my 2018 book, Welcoming New Americans, I follow the authors’ lead in examining city-level practices in response to immigrants, revealing considerable and expanding efforts to accommodate immigrants, as well as reinforcing many of their findings about the factors explaining local variation. Policing Immigrants has also been influential in recent works examining sanctuary cities and in investigations of how the enforcement patchwork affects the lives of immigrants and their families, including Angela García’s Legal Passing (2019), Heide Castañeda’s Beyond Borders (2019), and the work of Tom Wong and his collaborators at the University of California, San Diego’s US Immigration Policy Center. Moreover, the authors’ findings have increasing relevance beyond immigration policy, as cities take the lead on progressive policies surrounding not only immigration but also the environment and socioeconomic inequality, generating presidential ire and, increasingly, state-level preemption.
In sum, Policing Immigrants is necessary foundational reading to understand today’s debates around sanctuary cities, as well as the complicated position of local law enforcement and the growing dread of immigrants. As increases in threatened raids loom, Policing Immigrants makes a compelling argument that, when city and county law enforcement officials are asked to do the job of federal immigration enforcement, it often compromises their own job of maintaining local trust and public safety.
