Amada Armenta's new book, Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement, highlights the role of local law enforcement agencies in channeling Latino immigrants into the deportation regime. Armenta's beautifully chronicled text documents the implementation of an immigration enforcement program known as 287(g) in Nashville, Tennessee. During the 2007 to 2012 time period that Armenta studies, the Davidson County jail became one of the most active deportation machines in the nation, deporting nearly 10,000 Nashville residents (American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee 2012: 3).
Armenta's ambitious and valuable project reflects her unique perspective as an ethnographic researcher who rode along with police as they interacted with residents and initiated traffic stops on city streets (11–12). She also attended community meetings and conducted in-depth interviews with law enforcement, city officials, Latino immigrants, and employees at nonprofit organizations (12). Her on-the-ground investigation yields important insights that significantly advance our understanding of the intersection between policing, immigration, and race.
In recent years, local criminal law enforcement has become increasingly intertwined with federal deportation (Reference StumpfStumpf 2006). A growing body of scholarship today has addressed how local police play a role in immigration enforcement (Reference Beckett and EvansBeckett and Evans 2015; Reference EaglyEagly 2013; Reference ProvineProvine et al. 2016). By screening migrants in local jails, sheriffs become the conduits for sending noncitizens into the deportation pipeline. Once in place, a 287(g) jail program also converts the routine investigatory stops made by police (Reference Epp, Maynard-Moody and Haider-MarkelEpp et al. 2014) into a mechanism that triggers federal deportation screening (Reference MotomuraMotomura 2011).
Professor Armenta's research supplements these accounts with her insider perspective. She shows how a locality can create, justify, and deploy a system of community policing designed to win trust with the Latino community (90–101), while simultaneously converting law enforcement into immigration cops that terrorize immigrant communities. Indeed, Nashville was the home of an award-winning community policing program, while also the facilitator of an active jail-based immigration screening program which turned “spaces of everyday life” into “zones of immigration policing” (54).
One of Armenta's key insights is that although local law enforcement practices are seemingly race neutral, in practice they help to reinforce and rationalize a racialized criminal justice system that has a disparate impact on Latinos. Protect, Serve, and Deport brings to life the racialized operation of the criminal legal system by documenting first-hand the vast discretion that officers are given to enforce the law. In deciding whether to arrest someone for not wearing a seat belt, for example, Armenta finds that officers balance a range of considerations including the law, public safety, practicality, and their own personal sense of morality. Yet, this discretion can also be exercised in ways that perpetuate institutional bias and racism. As Armenta explains, “officers’ virtually unfettered discretion to arrest unlicensed drivers provided plenty of opportunities for officers to act on their prejudices” (85).
In the racialized process of immigration-motivated policing, documented residents are also swept into the constant police stops. In one haunting passage, Armenta recounts a Latino man pulled over for a window tint violation, searched, and let go while Armenta was riding along with police (68–69). The man told Armenta in Spanish that this was not the first time he had been pulled over for no reason and he was “frustrated by the continuous intrusions and by the officers’ assumptions he had done something wrong” (69). A lawful permanent resident working at a nonprofit organization reinforced this point when he explained to Armenta that in the Latino neighborhoods in Nashville “police presence is intensely felt. … we are drowning in patrols” (132).
Aware of the criticism that the 287(g) program was having a devastating impact on the Latino community, officers tried to convince Armenta that system was not biased. For example, one officer defended the program as not participating in racial profiling by stressing that “[p]eople like to use the phrase Mexicans, but not everyone is from Mexico” and highlighting that he had “sent individuals from Canada, England, Germany, and Russia through immigration court” (123). Another officer similarly insisted that it was “not true” that all deportees were Mexican, but then acknowledged that “nine times out of ten, majority of the cases that we do are Mexican—Mexican descent” (123). Yet, even in defending the legitimacy of the program, these officers underscored the deeply racialized process of immigration policing.
Armenta carefully documents how police and sheriffs seek to justify this system of localized immigration enforcement by promoting the myth of “immigrant criminality” (Reference RumbautRumbaut 2007). Although half of the 287(g) program arrests were from routine traffic stops, the county sheriff nonetheless insisted that in his view their petty arrest made them “criminal” (146). Defending the program in a community meeting that Armenta attended, the sheriff explained: “[I]f they're in jail they're criminals. … if someone is pulled over for no driver's license then they've committed a crime. They're a criminal” (146). This myth of immigrant criminality was further perpetuated by treating even immigrants arrested for offenses like driving without a license as medium-security inmates inside the county jail (122).
It is particularly fascinating how Armenta reveals that local officers often felt conflicted about their new role as immigration police. Although in some cases they thought that deportation was warranted, often they had serious misgivings about the consequences of their actions, such as when residents were arrested for minor traffic offenses. In order to justify their work in such instances, officers working in the jail rationalized that they had “no control” over who got dropped off for them to process (119). They also emphasized that they were simply “helping” the federal government and that they had “no idea” what ultimately happened to the individuals that they encountered (119).
In an executive order signed in 2017, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to pursue 287(g) agreements “to the maximum extent permitted by law” (Reference LaschLasch et al. 2018). As the number of 287(g) programs has grown, the findings of Armenta's groundbreaking study are more important than ever. Protect, Serve, and Deport should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding what happens when local police facilitate mass deportation.
