In Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants Sampaio provides a careful and detailed account of the development of a contemporary national security state that demobilizes citizens and demands passive acceptance of increased restrictions on their rights as the price of protection. Sampaio describes a process by which citizenship has been systematically degraded for all in the United States, even as Latinas have borne the brunt of this transformation. She argues that “through the war on terrorism, Latinas/os have increasingly become ‘potential terrorists’ even as they are being terrorized by the state” (7). She thus joins others in the field of Latino politics in tracing the way that increases in state authority that preceded but became highly visible after 9/11 have also shaped immigration enforcement and the criminalization of immigrants, particularly undocumented Latinas/os. According to Sampaio, “the rise of the security state and the attendant war on terrorism has been deeply racialized, but this process of racial construction, articulation, and execution has been intricately woven together with multiple configurations of gender” (10). Sampaio's notable contribution in this book is thus her intersectional approach to analyzing the “shifts in the boundaries of citizenship” (13) occasioned by a surge in the state's authority manifest in the “terrifying forms of ethnic intimidation, harassment, abuse and discrimination” (7) to which immigrant Latino/a communities have been subjected. Via a subtle reading of the discourses that have accompanied the passage of gender-based legislation and national security measures, Sampaio traces the operation of a “gendered logic of protection” (9) that naturalizes the expansion of a paternalistic and supposedly benevolent state in exchange for safety. She argues that “posing as protectors of the national, local, state, and federal agencies develop a paternalistic relationship with certain residents even as they demonize others as illegitimate predators” (11). Rather than being opposed, however, these dynamics “are intertwined, simultaneously feminizing the legitimate citizenry (rendering them silent, docile, and subservient) while racializing Arab, South Asian, and Latina/o citizens and noncitizens as terrorists” (11). In other words, while Latinas/os are at the forefront of state surveillance and harassment via immigration raids and so forth, citizens as a whole have been feminized in relation to the national security state.

Sampaio also draws our attention to the unintended consequences of the law. Two of the examples she discusses in the book, the 2005 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the 2003 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), actually increased surveillance of immigrant communities in the name of protecting women and children. By expanding the ability of local law enforcement officials to enforce immigration statutes, these laws led to a “surge in immigrant-related raids and roundups … [and thus] became a vehicle to facilitate additional scrutiny, harassment, and apprehension of immigrants” (68). Similarly, even the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy of 2012 reifies this narrative of the state as benevolent protector. By extending protections to childhood arrivals, the policy reinscribes the idea that certain vulnerable and innocent populations are deserving of the state's protection in a way that others—such as those who have broken the law either by knowingly entering the country illegally or committing a felony after gaining permanent resident status—are not.

Sampaio's arguments are persuasive, but there are two areas where I think the analysis could have been further developed. As reflected in the title of the book, one of its key claims is that, far from being the potential terrorists envisioned in national security discourses, Latino communities—and Latina women and children in particular—have been “terrorized” by the U.S. state. Sampaio points to the fear and panic provoked by immigration enforcement actions (44); she also argues that laws designed to protect women and children such as VAWA and TVPRA provided no recourse for the state's own “terrorizing practices” (69). Yet Sampaio never engages in a detailed conceptual discussion of “terror” or “terrorism.” It may be that this is the right term to describe current immigration enforcement, but it would be important to know exactly what she thinks is an instance of state terror and what is not. For example, an earlier period in U.S. history, the post-Reconstruction era, was characterized by widespread lynching, which was a more spectacular instance of violence than contemporary immigration raids. Lynchings were not always carried out by state agents acting in their official capacities, yet clearly the state was complicit. So what characterizes state terror? Is it who carries out the acts in question? Is it the scale of immigration enforcement? In other words, it would have been important to know whether Sampaio thinks there is something different about the terror experienced under the contemporary national security state.

Similarly, the provocative claim that all citizens have been feminized by a paternalistic state that demands submission as the price of protection raises key questions about what is being understood by feminization, and about whether it is in fact true that citizens have complied with the expectation of passivity. If we take seriously the idea of multiple masculinities, for example, rather than posing the issue in terms of all citizens being equally feminized, it might be more useful to think about the construction of subjugated masculinities. Similarly, rather than being characterized by uniform passivity in the face of increasing state violence, since the protests that broke out after the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, there has been an outpouring of public protest challenging police surveillance of black communities. This raises questions about whether and how citizens have challenged the implied bargain of the patriarchal natural security state. While this is clearly a book focused on the state and state practices, Sampaio's analysis left me wanting to know how she understands the response of Latinx activists to these practices. Are the DREAMers (the young Latinx activists who have mobilized in favor of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, which has been stalled in Congress since 2010, and which would grant conditional residency and, upon meeting further qualifications, permanent residency to immigrants who entered the country illegally before the age of sixteen and who are high school graduates), for example, acquiescing to the logic of protection/demonization or do they challenge it in any way?

This is a well-argued and carefully researched book, that will be of interest not only to scholars of gender and politics, immigration, and Latino Studies, but to all those interested in the state.