“I Would Wish Death on You…”
Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime

Racism and Removal: Displacing the Exceptionality of Immigrant “Invisibility”

The recent tide of “Immigrant Rights” activism across the United States has generated a peculiar political trajectory in concert with the alleged novelties of the “post-9/11” historical moment. Increased attention to the nuances of the Federal prison system in relation to the immigrant detention apparatus—which incorporates a fluctuating articulation between criminal justice institutionalities, from U.S. attorneys to the labyrinthine substrata of Homeland Security—has yielded a periodic (though no less troublesome) political insistence that 1) the objective sociopolitical crisis refracted in U.S. imprisonment strategies has substantially changed in form, and is significantly anchored to 2) a qualitative shift in the logic of the U.S. prison regime itself. Put succinctly, matter-of-fact proclamations that the incarceration of immigrants constitutes the most rapidly expanding appendage of the American prison industrial complex¹ are often invoked to suggest that conventional (read: non-immigrant focused) approaches to social justice activism and progressive critique fail to address the governing specificities of this particular focal point of U.S. policing and criminalization. By way of example, the 2004 report by the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective (CFFSC, an organization of which the author is an active member), “Resisting Homeland Security: Organizing Against Unjust Removal of U.S. Filipinos,” contends:

The increasing detention and removal of U.S. Filipinos remain invisible to many. The rising number of U.S. Filipinos detained and removed is directly tied to the shift in the U.S. government after the events of September 11, 2001. It is also tied to the legacy of U.S. imperialism.[emphasis added]²

While “”Resisting Homeland Security” is an extraordinary document, consisting of both a breathtaking historical account of Filipino criminalization and deportation under U.S. colonial/imperial/neocolonial formations and a clear analysis of the devastating, immediate and collateral violence enacted in the operation of the Homeland Security state, it reproduces a vexing political and analytical problem that seems to confound, misdirect, and/or confuse existing forms of praxis that seek viable opposition to U.S. state violence generally, and its carceral formation particularly: that is, the claim so frequently forwarded through implication and overt statement that accelerated immigrant detention in fact constitutes a conjunctural “shift” in the logic of U.S. state violence.

This claim, I contend, remains both undertheorized and overstated, such that repetition of particular empirical data and selective anecdotal narrative (e.g. the paradigmatic positioning of the counter-deportation struggle of the Cuevas family in the “Resisting Homeland Security” account) posits the current statecraft of immigrant detention as an exceptionality and historical novelty. This myopic analytical approach displaces—and pragmatically obstructs—the difficult praxis of conceptualizing immigrant detention within the organic logic of the totality of U.S. carceral state violence. In this sense, the self-evident claim that imprisoned immigrants (Filipino and otherwise) languish in a condition of exceptional “invisibility” fails to account for the structuring logic of invisibility, civil death, and racially formed social death that has constituted the U.S. prison regime in its most recent (post-1970s) as well as its longer historical renditions.

Thus, the CFFSC report is undermined by the absence of a substantive attempt to link Filipino deportation and immigrant imprisonment with either a critical analytical framing of the U.S. prison industrial complex across its contemporary racial and national geographies (including across the geographies of “citizen,” “non-citizen,” and “undocumented” bodies), or (perhaps more importantly) an adequate theoretical examination of the Homeland Security state as a derivative articulation of a durably racist and white supremacist U.S. state, which is constituted by logics of racism, racial terror, and institutionalized racial dehumanization precedent to the 2001 enactment of the USA Patriot Act or the 2002 Homeland Security Act. In fact, “Resisting Homeland Security” echoes the undertheorized position of many progressive critics of immigrant criminalization/detention practices by correlating recent changes in juridical rubrics with the onset of “new” modalities and logics of racism/racialization altogether:

The recent substantive changes under this [immigrant] “removal” rubric signal a distinct mode of societal regulation and governance, indicating new logics and practices of homeland security racism.[emphasis added]³

[Immigrant] removal, is a manifestation of a new racialized institutional logic and practice, homeland security racism, which is substantively different pre-9/11 racial logics and practices. Homeland security racism does not simply operate from the logic that “outsiders,” are to be feared, but aims to consolidate politically and economically the empire’s reign locally and globally. While immigrant laws and their enforcement remain a primary venue for racism in general, homeland security racism—as articulated through a wide range of ever-changing homeland security laws—has become an expression of imperialism directed inward against its own citizens and residents.[emphasis added]⁴

While it is certain that the empirical particularities of which bodies and putative “racial,” “national,” and/or “religious” subjectivities are subjected to enhanced scrutiny, punishment, and policing can shift radically in given historical moments, such empirical shifts do not necessarily equate to a transformation in the structuring logics or institutional technologies of racist state violence and white supremacist statecraft.

1. Editorial, “Gitmos Across America,” The New York Times, 27 June, 2007, Section A, 22 ; Nina Bernstein, “New Scrutiny As Immigrants Die in Custody” The New York Times, 26 June 2007, Section A, 1; Diana Welch, “Immigrant Detention Blues,” Austin Chronicle, 2 February 2007. [↩]
2. “Resisting Homeland Security: Organizing Against Unjust Removals of U.S. Filipinos”, report by the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective, San Jose, CA, December 2004, 1. [↩]
3. “Resisting Homeland Security”, 8. [↩]
4. Ibid., 10. [↩]