“La Polimigra”

Abstract

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.