This article examines the use of a presumption of illegality by local police officers to enforce a deportation regime in the Northwest Arkansas region. We employed an integrated racialized legal violence model to understand the way officers and immigration authorities collaborate to screen immigrants’ legal status for deportation purposes. Rather than focusing on how collaborations operate from an institutional point of view, the article provided a detailed and rich experiential description of participants’ realities shaped by the interplay of migration policy and local police practices. We concluded that the screening tactics used by local police in the cases considered in this article reflect a form of racialized legal violence intended to enforce a deportation regime against unauthorized people of Latino origin from this Arkansas area.

In the summer of 2014, the South Texas–Mexico border became the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis as thousands of unaccompanied minors and mothers from Central America seeking asylum traveled to the Rio Grande Valley. The institutional response from the state of Texas was to militarize the border with a multi-agency initiative dubbed Operation Strong Safety, at a cost of $1.3 million a week for the remainder of the year. I collected data for this study while I worked as a police officer in a police department located on the South Texas–Mexico border that participated in the operation. Importantly, from an institutional perspective, this study illustrates what police officers do while working on this operation. Findings reveal that officers spent their time performing non-enforcement functions. I argue that state governmental officials should divest from ineffective border security operations and should instead allocate funds to local communities and local organizations who are assisting with the humanitarian crisis.