This is a detailed, well-researched book that can help anyone learn or review the basics of contemporary immigration enforcement in the United States. As a founder and director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights at Penn State law school, and an immigration practitioner who served as a deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, Professor Wadhia can speak authoritatively to the complexities of immigration enforcement and its impact on affected communities. She supplemented her own experience with interviews in the field of more than a dozen immigration lawyers.
Warning: Wadhia does not paint a pretty picture. Rather this is a book about the weaponizing of immigration enforcement by an administration determined to reduce the number of immigrants who enter or remain in the United States. Expedited removal, tough standards for asylees, reduced numbers of refugees, detention, higher standards for legal immigrants—these are some of the tools Wadhia discusses in detail. Even the cost of applying for citizenship is going up and standards are tightening for avoiding the big fee involved. This administration is pushing immigration enforcement and related policies to the limit, with judicial intervention as the only stopping point.
Immigration enforcement in the United States is built on a legal foundation that was never immigrant friendly. This body of law gives prospective Americans no substantive rights and few procedural guarantees. The enforcement apparatus is larded with discretion. In more immigrant-friendly periods, the discretion accorded judges, immigration agents, and the chief executive helped some immigrants who might be subject to deportation to move to a more secure status. No more. Discretion—its use, abuse, and the limitations that have been imposed upon it—is, appropriately, a major theme of this book.
Each chapter unpacks a key element of the current enforcement regime, beginning with a series of efforts to create a ban on Muslims from certain countries. Another chapter focuses on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and its vulnerabilities. The more general question of enforcement priorities gets a separate chapter; the Trump administration's answer to this important policy question is to prioritize everyone for deportation, saints and sinners alike. Not surprisingly, the jettisoning of any balancing of enforcement equities for people has a parallel in readiness to carry out enforcement everywhere, including in places that have traditionally been off limits for ICE agents, such as courts, schools, and hospitals.
As the United States erects barriers to regular and irregular migration, it is also changing its profile on the world stage. This is evident in many ways, but what Wadhia focuses on in detail here are the limits imposed on refugees. The changes have been dramatic because the number of refugees to be admitted is up to the president's unfettered discretion. The Trump presidency took matters one step further by making the already arduous approval process much more difficult.
There are points in this book where Wadhia's decision to concentrate almost exclusively on the federal level creates a slightly misleading picture. The state and local level is also significant in immigration enforcement. States like Arizona have attempted to push the federal government into more aggressive enforcement, and in the process have encouraged restrictive sentiment elsewhere. The battle over “sanctuary cities” is furious and on-going. The national level, having claimed sole authority to make immigration policy, is now trying to force state and local police to join the enforcement effort (see e.g. Provine et al. Reference Provine, Varsanyi, Lewis and Decker2016), or consider the interesting struggle over refugee resettlement. The Trump administration decided to let state and municipal governments determine whether they want to resettle refugees in their jurisdictions, probably assuming that most would oppose the settlement. But it did not turn out that way—the support for refugees is quite strong around the nation, revealing a significant divide between the federal government's increasingly harsh restrictionism and the heartland's sense of responsibility to people fleeing violence and repression.
Banned includes a helpful chapter on ways that immigration enforcement should be changed to provide more humane alternatives to the policies the Trump administration has initiated. There is a prescription for actions that need to be taken both by the federal executive and by Congress. For Congress, for example, legalization of long-term residents who pose no threat to their communities, and for the executive, a lifting of the Muslim ban, and a re-thinking of enforcement priorities.
Readers should not expect this book to go very far in reflecting on why the Trump administration has taken a turn toward harsh enforcement and tough standards for admission. This book is a practical guide to the decisions that have been made and their impact. These details themselves, however, tell a deeper story of rejection of immigration as a public good for society and economy, and a profound lack of concern for global displacement, some of which has been caused by our own policies. It must also be recalled that not every aspect of restrictive enforcement policy is a Trump product; President Obama earned the title of “deporter in chief” and Congress in 1996 passed legislation that paved the way for expedited removals and expanded enforcement. The irony of closed doors in a nation built on immigration is completely lost on this administration. Perhaps more significantly, this irony and the manifest cruelties of current policies are also lost on many Americans. Mr. Trump won election in part because of his antagonism toward immigrants. We need to reflect on this reality and understand it if the nation is going to enter a new, more immigrant-friendly era.
