From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

Tanya Golash-Boza of University of California, Merced reviews From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America, by Patrisia Macías-Rojas. Professor Patrisia Macías-Rojas unpacks how the incarceration of over two million people in the United States gave impetus to a federal immigration initiative—The Criminal Alien Program (CAP)—designed to purge non-citizens from dangerously overcrowded jails and prisons. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the findings in this book reveal how the Criminal Alien Program quietly set off a punitive turn in immigration enforcement that has fundamentally altered detention, deportation, and criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses. Patrisia Macías-Rojas presents a “street-level” perspective on how this new regime has serious lived implications for the day-to-day actions of Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement, civil and human rights advocates, and for migrants and residents of predominantly Latina/o border communities.

Read the book review at https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12368