AHA Session 282
Sunday, January 10, 2027: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Grand Ballroom A (Sheraton New Orleans, 5th Floor)
Chair:
Max Felker-Kantor, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Panel:
Felicia Arriaga, Baruch College, City University of New York
Max Felker-Kantor, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Willie J. Mack Jr., University of Missouri
Brianna Nofil, College of William and Mary
Alexander Stephens, Southern Methodist University
Max Felker-Kantor, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Willie J. Mack Jr., University of Missouri
Brianna Nofil, College of William and Mary
Alexander Stephens, Southern Methodist University
Session Abstract
The recent punitive surge by the Trump administration against immigrant communities across the United States led by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrant and Customs Enforcement agents has been well documented. It is not uncommon to see images of federal ICE agents terrorizing immigrants, bystanders, nonviolent protestors, and legal observers daily. In response, some local politicians, such as Minneapolis-St. Paul mayor Jacob Frey have turned to the local police agencies to protect citizens and immigrants from illegal kidnappings, searches and assaults by federal agents. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has opposed the immigration raids and pledged to prevent local police from collaborating with ICE. And New York State governor Kathy Holchul has also ordered the local police not to work with federal agents. However, the history of local police forces in containing, surveilling, and deporting immigrants is lengthy and still understudied. Beginning with the creation of the first official police departments in Boston, New York City, and Chicago, in the 1800s through the 1980s and 1990s, police have played a central role in immigrant control. Throughout this period, police departments engaged with various immigrant groups through different means of coercion, surveillance, and discipline. However, after 1965, with the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, which replaced the racist National Origins policy that favored immigration from western Europe, local police departments were increasingly encountering non-European immigrants.
This roundtable will interrogate the recent (1970s-1990s) history of policing in immigrant communities. Round table participants will discuss the ways in which different police and sheriff’s departments across the country - including in places like Los Angeles, New York, Miami - interacted with local immigrant community groups, federal authorities, and immigrants themselves. Focusing on the latter decades of the twentieth century, this roundtable will locate the decades-long intersections between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents that have gained even more salience in the present moment.
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