Protect, Serve, and Deport - by Amada Armenta (Paperback)

About the Book

"Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals, but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver removable immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, the UC Press open access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals, but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging.

From the Back Cover

"Local police and sheriffs are increasingly involved in identifying and reporting suspected illegal immigrants, assuming the role of junior partners in federal immigration enforcement in many communities. How do they feel about the deportation implications of their work? Amada Armenta answers this question by looking closely at what officers are doing in Nashville, Tennessee, a city divided in its views about immigrants. Armenta artfully weaves participants' justifications for their actions with her own scholarly analysis, finding that bureaucratic priorities, relevant laws, and local norms all help officers distance themselves from the frequently grave consequences of their work."--Doris Marie Provine, Professor Emerita, School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University

"Drawing on rich interviews and observations, this work evocatively shows how local police and jail employees have been drawn unwittingly into arresting and deporting hundreds of thousands of law-abiding immigrants and how this activity erodes trust in the police and fractures families and communities. This is painful but essential reading."--Charles R. Epp, coauthor of Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship

"This engaging, fine-grained ethnography takes us into the world of those charged with enforcing immigration laws. In vivid detail it unpacks the subtleties, intricacies, and contradictions of the job. Protect, Serve, and Deport contains an abundance of insights to make us pause to think as we see and examine the products of the enforcement regime. At a time when enforcement is expanding, this book is increasingly salient for understanding how enforcement is actually performed. It is essential, critical, urgent reading today."--Cecilia Menjívar, author of Enduring Violence: Ladina Women's Lives in Guatemala

"Should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding what happens when local police facilitate mass deportation."--Law & Society Review

Review Quotes

"Amada Armenta's Protect, Serve, and Deport makes a notable contribution to this burgeoning scholarship by tracing the adoption, rollout, and consequences of the 287(g) program in Davidson County, Tennessee . . . [it] is particularly timely and highly relevant to scholars researching immigrant criminalization, policing, or color-blind racism."-- "American Journal of Sociology"

"Armenta provides us with a rich ethnography of immigration policing in Nashville that is so insightful that it will also be of interest to scholars working on immigration enforcement, bordering practices, racial profiling, discretion, and policing in many other settings. It is truly a stellar book that should become mandatory reading on any syllabus or comprehensive exam list in border criminology and critical police studies in the United States and beyond."-- "Border Criminologies"

"Should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding what happens when local police facilitate mass deportation."-- "Law & Society Review"

"This stellar volume cements Armenta's status as an expert ethnographer working at the intersection of the sociology of critical criminology, law and society, and immigration. Academics and non-academics, graduate and under-graduate students alike will find in this text a readable and eminently troubling portrait of immigrant life in the deportation nation, a story deftly told through the clear-eyed and empathetic vision of one of the field's rising stars."-- "Theoretical Criminology"

About the Author

Amada Armenta is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.