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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.

Despite the recent boom in scholarly works on affect from a range of disciplines, scant attention has been paid to the intersection of affect and racialization processes, either historically or in contemporary contexts. This paper situates the diachronic articulation of race and affect�particularly in terms of the historical everyday lives and the political, economic, and material contexts of populations from Latin American and Caribbean backgrounds�in anthropological studies of �racialization� and the �affective turn.� Drawing on a broad reading of both scientific and popular constructions of affect among Latin American and US Latino populations, we propose the concept of �racialized affect� to account for the contradictions embedded in the study of race and affect, both separately and at their intersections. We highlight what we see as the two cornerstones of our theoretical intervention: on the one hand, a conception of �liable affect� results in a simplified, undermined subjectivity of populations racialized as Other, and, on the other hand, a conception of �empowering affect� perpetuates the privileged and nuanced affective subjectivity frequently reserved for whites in the United States and for self-styled �whitened� elites in Latin America.

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).

A variety of phenomena including mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have since the 1970s produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. This special issue builds upon, but also extends, prior discussions on transnational citizenship, by situating new practices of ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’ citizenship and the policies that both facilitate and delimit them in a broader political–economic context and accounts for how new forms of neoliberal governance shape such practices. The essays included here draw from a range of disciplines and inter-disciplinary perspectives that focus on migration between the United States and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean which in recent years have been transformed into ‘emigrant states.’