The Origins of the Criminal Alien Program

In this paper, I examine the anti-criminal provisions of U.S. deportation policy, which Congress first created in 1891.  Initially, immigration agents rarely used these provisions because, as one official noted in 1898, most facilities did not record the immigration status of inmates.  The current picture is quite different.  In 2008, for instance, the U.S. government deported 97,133 immigrants under its criminal-status provisions or about 27% of all removals.  My paper contributes to a greater understanding of one of today’s largest and most significant categories of deportation: removal for “criminal status.”

Deportation was conceived, rhetorically and legally, as a power to protect the nation state and national sovereignty.  The conceptualization of deportation as protection for the state, rather than as punishment for individuals, enabled the U.S. government to classify deportation as a civil rather than criminal proceeding.  Scholars are currently documenting the rise of punishment in the post-emancipation South and changes in prison systems.  By addressing the connections between the changing criminal justice system and the early use of the anti-criminal deportation provisions, between 1891 and 1924, this paper contributes to a larger project of rethinking the origins of federal immigration policy within the context of the post-emancipation period.

By extending my analysis to include an examination of the anti-criminal provision since 1996, my work addresses the racialized and gendered nature of crime, especially in Southern California.  It will also cover ICE’s Criminal Alien Program, which the government now uses to identify immigrants incarcerated under criminal law and remove them before the end of their sentence.  Examination of both the origins and recent histories of criminal-status deportations furthers our understanding of the continuum of state coercive power by documenting that immigration law increasingly criminalized immigrant men and women, who faced deportation rather than incarceration in U.S. prisons.