Broken Mirrors: Identity, Duty, and Belonging in the Age of the New La(tinx) Migra
The face of immigration law enforcement has changed significantly in the last three decades. But outside of formal policy changes noted extensively by immigration scholars, including the rise of mass immigrant incarceration and detention, deportation, and enforcement partnerships between federal and local authorities, one of the most striking changes has gone relatively unnoticed in academic circles: the literal changing face of immigration law enforcement agencies.
Today, more than any other period in history, the composition of the uniformed divisions of federal immigration law enforcement agencies—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—reflect the demographics of the populations they police. Relative to all other public agencies, in fact, immigration law enforcement agencies drive advances in Latinx federal workforce participation. Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—the agency that houses both CBP and ICE—leads all other public agencies with the greatest proportion (20.9%) of Latinx personnel. Among uniformed ICE and CBP officers alone, Latinxs are overrepresented relative to their proportion of the entire federal workforce by more than two and a half (21.6%) and four times (38.0%), respectively.
But where scholars have failed to acknowledge, much less explore the implications of a disproportionately Latinx immigration law enforcement workforce, response from the general public is pronounced, centered on what is perceived as an absolute certainty: immigration officers’ ethnic identities matter. Precisely how they matter, though, remains a major point of contention.
To some, increasing proportions of Latinx immigration enforcement officers pose a threat to the legitimacy of the nation’s immigration laws, and by extension, national security. Such notions are exemplified in statements like the following: “How many of them are illegal aliens themselves?”; “No wonder our borders are so porous”; and “Bienvenidos to the badged foxes guarding the chicken coop.” The implication of such statements is that Latinx officers’ ethnic identities forestall the evenhanded enforcement of immigration law; the bonds of shared
ethnicity, in other words, are thought to subordinate organizational (and by the nature of the work, national) identity, commitment, and duty.
Others, however, see increasing proportions of Latinx immigration enforcement officers as divisive; a threat to Latinx identity, itself. Latinx officers are seen as ‘traitors’ or ‘vendidos’ for joining ‘the enemy,’ for what is seen as turning their backs on their community. The underlying assumption here is that for Latinx immigration officers ethnicity is subordinate to organizational identity, or in simpler terms, the uniform. From this perspective, the argument that immigration officers’ ethnic identities matter is undergirded by the assumption, if not firm belief, that ethnicity should matter; that when Latinx immigration officers exercise their discretionary authority as agents of the state, they should do so with a sensitivity to their own connection to the immigrant experience, be it one, or two-plus generations removed; with a sensitivity to the fact that outside of their uniforms, they are just as likely to be questioned about their citizenship status as the individuals they are charged with apprehending, detaining, and deporting.
Latinx immigration enforcement officers occupy, and experience, a unique position in the socio- political landscape of the United States. Simultaneously scrutinized for being too Latinx, and not Latinx enough, they live under constant pressure to negotiate multiple, overlapping and what may very well qualify as contradictory social group memberships. But to say that such pressures are, by definition, external, arising solely from particular (or peripheral) elements of the public, would be misleading. Such responses are merely reflections of the dynamics inherent to intersectionality itself, reflections of an inner war of belonging that marks the American Latinx, and minority experience more generally. Consider, for instance, the nature of Latinx immigration officers’ overlapping group memberships, and the tensions they engender.
As Latinxs, they are members of a distinct social identity group, a group whose growing numbers and political salience continue to be met with suspicion and fear on the part of native- born, non-Hispanic populations. As immigration law enforcement officers, they are members of organizations responsible for, depending on the agency: 1) preventing unauthorized entry into, and movement within, the territorial United States (CBP); and 2) apprehending and expelling from the country those territorially present without authorization (ICE)—tasks that have led to increased surveillance and policing of Latinx communities across the country. But as both Latinxs and immigration officers, they are, at once, both the targets and hands of the state. They are, to borrow from Anzaldua, the living embodiment of the frontera; they are the battleground, their ‘enemies’ are kin, and at home, they are strangers.
How Latinx immigration officers internalize, and deal with such tensions is the central focus of my dissertation. What does it mean to be, simultaneously, the police and the policed, both the problem and the solution? How do Latinx immigration officers make sense of, or balance these cross-cutting social identities and the pressures they imply? How do such negotiations shape the exercise of discretionary authority, and by extension, the implementation and ultimate shape of immigration policy? And what do such identity negotiations tell us about the boundaries of group membership, more specifically, the contours and flexibility of Latinx identity? Drawing on more than one-hundred in-depth interviews with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers across three states (Texas, California, and Arizona), and hours of participant observation with ICE field operations units, I address these questions and begin a conversation about the bounds of Latinx identity in the age of a growing ‘La(tinx) Migra.’
Today, more than any other period in history, the composition of the uniformed divisions of federal immigration law enforcement agencies—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—reflect the demographics of the populations they police. Relative to all other public agencies, in fact, immigration law enforcement agencies drive advances in Latinx federal workforce participation. Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—the agency that houses both CBP and ICE—leads all other public agencies with the greatest proportion (20.9%) of Latinx personnel. Among uniformed ICE and CBP officers alone, Latinxs are overrepresented relative to their proportion of the entire federal workforce by more than two and a half (21.6%) and four times (38.0%), respectively.
But where scholars have failed to acknowledge, much less explore the implications of a disproportionately Latinx immigration law enforcement workforce, response from the general public is pronounced, centered on what is perceived as an absolute certainty: immigration officers’ ethnic identities matter. Precisely how they matter, though, remains a major point of contention.
To some, increasing proportions of Latinx immigration enforcement officers pose a threat to the legitimacy of the nation’s immigration laws, and by extension, national security. Such notions are exemplified in statements like the following: “How many of them are illegal aliens themselves?”; “No wonder our borders are so porous”; and “Bienvenidos to the badged foxes guarding the chicken coop.” The implication of such statements is that Latinx officers’ ethnic identities forestall the evenhanded enforcement of immigration law; the bonds of shared
ethnicity, in other words, are thought to subordinate organizational (and by the nature of the work, national) identity, commitment, and duty.
Others, however, see increasing proportions of Latinx immigration enforcement officers as divisive; a threat to Latinx identity, itself. Latinx officers are seen as ‘traitors’ or ‘vendidos’ for joining ‘the enemy,’ for what is seen as turning their backs on their community. The underlying assumption here is that for Latinx immigration officers ethnicity is subordinate to organizational identity, or in simpler terms, the uniform. From this perspective, the argument that immigration officers’ ethnic identities matter is undergirded by the assumption, if not firm belief, that ethnicity should matter; that when Latinx immigration officers exercise their discretionary authority as agents of the state, they should do so with a sensitivity to their own connection to the immigrant experience, be it one, or two-plus generations removed; with a sensitivity to the fact that outside of their uniforms, they are just as likely to be questioned about their citizenship status as the individuals they are charged with apprehending, detaining, and deporting.
Latinx immigration enforcement officers occupy, and experience, a unique position in the socio- political landscape of the United States. Simultaneously scrutinized for being too Latinx, and not Latinx enough, they live under constant pressure to negotiate multiple, overlapping and what may very well qualify as contradictory social group memberships. But to say that such pressures are, by definition, external, arising solely from particular (or peripheral) elements of the public, would be misleading. Such responses are merely reflections of the dynamics inherent to intersectionality itself, reflections of an inner war of belonging that marks the American Latinx, and minority experience more generally. Consider, for instance, the nature of Latinx immigration officers’ overlapping group memberships, and the tensions they engender.
As Latinxs, they are members of a distinct social identity group, a group whose growing numbers and political salience continue to be met with suspicion and fear on the part of native- born, non-Hispanic populations. As immigration law enforcement officers, they are members of organizations responsible for, depending on the agency: 1) preventing unauthorized entry into, and movement within, the territorial United States (CBP); and 2) apprehending and expelling from the country those territorially present without authorization (ICE)—tasks that have led to increased surveillance and policing of Latinx communities across the country. But as both Latinxs and immigration officers, they are, at once, both the targets and hands of the state. They are, to borrow from Anzaldua, the living embodiment of the frontera; they are the battleground, their ‘enemies’ are kin, and at home, they are strangers.
How Latinx immigration officers internalize, and deal with such tensions is the central focus of my dissertation. What does it mean to be, simultaneously, the police and the policed, both the problem and the solution? How do Latinx immigration officers make sense of, or balance these cross-cutting social identities and the pressures they imply? How do such negotiations shape the exercise of discretionary authority, and by extension, the implementation and ultimate shape of immigration policy? And what do such identity negotiations tell us about the boundaries of group membership, more specifically, the contours and flexibility of Latinx identity? Drawing on more than one-hundred in-depth interviews with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers across three states (Texas, California, and Arizona), and hours of participant observation with ICE field operations units, I address these questions and begin a conversation about the bounds of Latinx identity in the age of a growing ‘La(tinx) Migra.’