On the Side of Ice - by Peter Mancina

Book Synopsis

Shows how police serve to assist ICE despite sanctuary laws insisting otherwise

In the United States, local law enforcement agencies are legally and organizationally independent entities from federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ICE. While local police enforce local, state and federal laws, they are not required to enforce civil immigration laws. This book examines the role of local police as voluntary, auxiliary reinforcements for ICE, focusing on the police force in New Jersey. It argues that even police in sanctuary jurisdictions, which explicitly label themselves as immigrant-friendly, are nonetheless still informally multiplying ICE's forces through voluntary cooperation.

While to date, the ethnography of policing has been produced from participant observation with the police in "ride-alongs" during patrol work and in jails and the examination of official documents like police reports, this book employs a novel method of transcribing police body worn camera (BWC) video footage to provide immersive, ethnographic thick description narratives of instances of local police officers assisting ICE. It makes the case that BWC ethnographic methods are better able to capture realistic interactions between the police and those they stop than when participant observers are on the scene. The volume thus not only reveals the ways in which local police function to assist ICE in enforcing federal civil immigration law, but also demonstrates the significance of using BWC-based ethnographies to examine how police exercise power. From police footage, internal records, and other materials, On the Side of ICE renders intimate, on-the-ground ethnographic narratives that illuminate what policing immigration looks like in contemporary America.

Review Quotes

"In political debates about immigration policy, sanctuary is one-sided. On the ground it's complicated- sometimes even contradictory. Analyzing interactions between police and ordinary people, Peter Mancina's deeply researched and provocative On the Side of Ice shows that the gap between sanctuary and policing is closer than policymakers, advocates, and migrants imagine it."--César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, author of Welcome the Wretched and Migrating to Prison

"Mancina masterfully utilizes police worn body camera footage to produce a timely and provocative picture of the role of local police in the national deportation machine."--Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing

About the Author

Peter Mancina is Adjunct Professor in the Rutgers Law School at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.