Fear and trauma in immigration policy

On Christmas Eve, agents associated with the Department of Homeland Security raided the homes of 121 adults and children said to have arrived recently in the United States from Central America without documents. Timed as they were, the raids seemed designed to create a wave of trauma and fear through immigrants already in the United States as well as those still considering the risky move across borders. Homeland Security Secre­tary Jeh Johnson appeared to say as much when he defended the widely criticized raids as an attempt to send a message to other Central Americans considering fleeing the violence of their countries. “People should take from this the understanding that the administration is quite serious when it comes to enforcing immigration laws.”

Anthropologist Jason De León and psychologist Luis Zayas describe the tradition and effects of using trauma and fear to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. De León tells the story of deportation and immigration policy in relation to his extensive fieldwork among deportees. Zayas explores the phenomenon of divided families, detailing the effects of U.S. immigration policy on children who are citizens but whose parents are living in the United States without documents. Both books underscore what the Christmas Eve raids so vividly demonstrate: that U.S. immigration policy has long used the imposition of trauma and the dynamics of fear to control who crosses the southern U.S. border.

While I’m tempted to portray Jeh Johnson as a man whose singular obsession with enforcement frequently overcomes commonsense and common decency, his words and policies are in fact part of a larger U.S. strategy that can be traced to the 1990s. At that time, the use of trauma and fear to enforce immigration laws came to be called officially Prevention Through Deterrence. The meaning of Prevention Through Deter­rence has varied over time, and De León tells some of this story. Prevention Through Deterrence has meant, for example, strategically placing security checkpoints along the border in locations that force would-be border crossers more deeply into the deadly desert.