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Impact of Crimmigration on Immigrant Youth

-- By FeliciaReyes - 26 Apr 2022

Who is deserving of protection?

In 2010, the Georgia Board of Regents that adopted harsh anti-immigrant policies that made it virtually impossible for undocumented students to attend Georgia State schools. See Regents Adopt New Policies on Undocumented Students, 2010. Freedom University was an organization created out of response to this policy. Its mission centered on creating classroom style learning for undocumented students who wanted to attend university, but couldn’t, and creating a safe space for these students to connect with professors and others who were ardently fighting against the policy change. Freedom University launched several campaigns which focused on the fact that the students being denied admission are good people, who want to contribute to society and are therefore deserving of the chance to do that.

My visit with these students was incredibly inspiring, but it left me thinking about who was deserving of being embraced in this country? Who was deserving of protection? What about those funneled into the criminal justice system? The data is well-established. Young, impressionable people living in communities plagued by poverty and over-criminalization are more likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system. Immigrant communities are not exempt from these issues, and oftentimes are more vulnerable. However, for justice-impacted youth who are undocumented, there is an added stressor that immigration officials will get involved.

Freedom University’s mission is an important one, but it does seem that many voices are left out of that rhetoric. Particularly, those of undocumented young people who had had run-ins with the law and wouldn’t be considered “good contributing members of society.” However, give that a lot of these youth are products of the American environment they are growing up in, does that mean they are not deserving of protection from deportation or other oppressive policies?

The intersection of immigration and criminal law

Crimmigration is a concept that focuses on the intersection of criminal law and that of immigration law and procedure. At this intersection, we see local law enforcement working in conjunction with federal immigration officials to surveil, round-up, and detain immigrants.

During the Trump Administration, there was a strong emphasis on “criminal immigrant youth” that resulted in large sweeps and raids throughout the United States. The administration targeted a Salvadoran-American street gang known as MS13. New York, in particular, is home to 560,000 undocumented people and about 1 million New Yorkers live in mixed status households. State of our Immigrant City: Annual Report, 2018. Nearly 37% of undocumented immigrants living in New York City have less than a high school degree. Id. at 15. A majority of these immigrants reside in working-class neighborhoods due to a lack of social and human capital and in marginalized communities, youth are often exposed to multiple levels of trauma and criminalization resulting in high rates of contact with the criminal justice system.

Criminalizing undocumented immigrant youth is seen lucidly through the school-to-prison- and many times to deportation pipeline. For example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched Operation Matador in 2017 to target gang members and associates in the Greater New York area. Essentially, they work with local law enforcement and gang databases to identify possible gang members. At the moment, these databases are unregulated and criteria for inclusion is arbitrary; people who wear certain clothing and those who talk to “known” gang members are oftentimes included on this list. Swept up in the Sweep, 2018. “One clear outcome of Matador has been the increase of unwarranted and unsubstantiated gang allegations being used as a basis to detain immigrants, or to deny applications for benefits such as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) or asylum. Id. at 19. Under Matador there have been 729 “suspected gang members” arrested and 5,300 deportations in 2017 alone. Id. at 19.

What’s the impact?

Given the U.S.’s racial diversity, continuous criminalization and pipeline funneling will further disempower the most vulnerable populations causing greater socioeconomic disparities, inducing fear of law enforcement in immigrant communities and creating stronger systemic oppression through the criminalization of undocumented youth. Consequently, this then becomes a disinvestment in the next generation.

The question should not be whether these young people are worthy of protection, but rather how we can protect them. Unfortunately, not protecting them hurts more than just the individual, it can also have drastic consequences on both the family and community at large.

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