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On March 24, 2020, a 31-year-old Mexican national in Bergen County Jail, New Jersey, became the first federal immigration detainee to test positive for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). By April 10, 2020, New Jersey had more confirmed COVID-19 cases among immigration detainees than any other state in the nation. This article examines the relationship between COVID-19 and processes of migrant detention and deportation through a case study of New Jersey — an early epicenter of the pandemic and part of the broader New York City metro area. Drawing on publicly available reports and in-depth interviews with wardens, immigration lawyers, advocates, and former detainees, we describe the initial COVID-19 response in four detention facilities in New Jersey. Our findings suggest that migrant detention and deportation present distinct challenges that undermine attempts to contain the spread of COVID-19. We provide testimonies from migrant detainees who speak to these challenges in unsettling personal terms. Our interviews highlight the insufficient actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to contain the spread of the pandemic and a troubling lack of due process in immigration court proceedings. Based on these findings, we argue that reducing the number of migrants detained in the United States is needed not only in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic but also as a preventative measure for future health crises. Reductions can be achieved, in part, by reforming federal immigration laws on “mandatory detention.”

Migrant smuggling has in recent decades become more prominent globally as a consequence of increasingly restrictive border and migration control policies. Whereas popular media discourses and official policy typically depict migrant smugglers as organized criminals who prey on vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers, migration scholars have instead argued that migrant smuggling is a complex marketplace involving both licit and illicit transactions and a grounded social and cultural practice through which aspiring migrants confront their lack of legal options for migration. Despite efforts to empirically situate migrant smuggling as something other than just ruthless criminal activity towards innocent victims, less attention has been given to migrants’ own understanding of their travel options and regulation of associated risks. This chapter focuses on coyoterismo -or migrant smuggling – as a community-based activity embedded in the social fabric of migrant-sending communities in Southern Ecuador. We examine the limits of the contractual relationships established between smugglers (coyoteros), money-lenders (chulqueros), and migrants and their families who rely on these services to sustain their mobile livelihoods. Specifically, we focus on how indigenous migrants from Cañar make use of multiple legal systems to assert their agency and establish accountability vis-a-vis the coyotes who facilitate their migration between Ecuador and the United States.

Each year the United States government detains and deports hundreds of thousands of people who prior to their removal are held in confinement for an average of 55 days. The short and long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic on migrant detention and deportation continue to be evaluated in real time, including how we can best study it. This paper provides a timely analysis on the relationship between immigration enforcement and confinement, public health emergencies, and ethnographic methods. It makes two contributions. The first is methodological and focuses on the challenges and opportunities of ethnographic methods in carceral settings when pandemic-related protocols have raised additional challenges to conventional in-person prison ethnography. The second contribution is empirical and documents how we adapted ethnographic methods to an interdisciplinary research design and to the exigencies of the pandemic to study the spread of the coronavirus in four immigrant detention facilities in New Jersey, USA.

En noviembre de 2016, el 26% del padron electoral de Estados Unidos voto por el entonces candidato a la Presidencia Donald Trump, quien dirigio una campana electoral con base en la retorica anti-inmigrante que prometia deportar a 11 millones de indocumentados y construir un enorme muro a lo largo de la frontera sur, para lo cual obligaria al Gobierno mexicano a pagar por la construccion del mismo. Al llegar a la Casa Blanca, Trump no perdio tiempo: el 27 de enero de 2017 firmo una orden ejecutiva titulada “Mejorar la seguridad publica en el interior de Estados Unidos”. Esta orden amplia significativamente la categoria de “extranjeros removibles” (Removable Aliens) y senala que los no ciudadanos que han entrado a Estados Unidos cruzando la frontera sin documentos o que han entrado con visas que luego expiraron representan una “amenaza significativa” para la seguridad nacional y la seguridad publica. La orden ejecutiva de Trump y la guia adjunta del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional (DHS, por sus siglas en ingles) eliminan las prioridades establecidas por el expresidente Barack Obama y ordenan a las agencias federales que empleen “todos los medios legales” contra “todos los extranjeros removibles”, incluyendo a aquellos acusados que no han sido condenados (MPI 2017).

Since the 1980s, political instability and national and global economic crisis have increasingly undermined the ability of the Peruvian state to maintain a viable national economy and sustain its population. The past decade has seen efforts by the state to reclaim emigrant citizens and facilitate their incorporation into a redefined Peruvian nation that extends beyond the country’s borders. Examination of two instances of the struggle over extraterritorial membership and the processes of inclusion and exclusion emerging from this struggle suggests that by extending both symbolic and material membership to the emigrant population the Peruvian state is restructuring and reconceptualizing itself in the context of a changing global economy.