Understanding Crimmigration: Implications for Racial and Ethnic Minorities Within the United States

Crimmigration, or the intertwining of criminal and immigration law, allows whether explicitly or implicitly for local law enforcement and increasingly other government agencies, to act as enforcers of both aspects of the law. Increasingly, practices and polices implemented within this realm are characteristic of interior enforcement practices, expanding beyond border enforcement. No longer are these solely the responsibility of federal immigration agents, but now local law enforcement participates in these seemingly hidden initiatives. In the process of this merge, the scope of citizenship and the applicability of certain rights is continuously narrowing in what Juliet Stumpf refers to in The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power as a society increasingly stratified by flexible conceptions of membership. To unwind and reform the connections between these two systems requires the treatment of them as components of a larger emphasis on exclusionary social-control ideology and practices, directed at immigrants and minorities alike.