A Critical Latino Response to President Trump's Executive Order on Interior Immigration Enforcement

Background and Purpose: On January 25, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (EO) entitled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” This EO makes all undocumented immigrants a priority for deportation, drastically expands the authority of the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement officials to enforce immigration laws and revokes federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions. Soon after the signing, deportations across the country increased by 32.6 percent compared to last year. Despite a recent judicial block on the removal of funding for sanctuary jurisdictions, it is only one aspect of the EO and the Trump administration will continue to defended this law in the Supreme Court. Immigrant communities remain living in a climate of uncertainty and fear.

        U.S. immigration policy historically has followed a pattern of racializing and criminalizing non-white immigrants, hence blaming people of color. More recently, the Social Work Grand Challenges paper, Achieving Equal Opportunity and Justice: The Integration of Latina/o Immigrants into American Society, posits that dominant immigration public discourse portrays immigrants as criminals. This EO follows a similar pattern embedded in a racist narrative. The purpose of this study is to analyze this EO through the lens of Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit), with a specific focus on Latino citizens and non-citizens, which to our knowledge has not been done before.

Methods: This study utilized critical discourse analysis to examine this order. Following a deductive approach, the authors employed LatCrit to code the primary text from the EO for the following tenets; (a) subtle racist narratives, (b) stakeholders of EO, (c) differential racialization, (d) system that benefits whites, (e) impact on different identities, and (f) essentialist views.

Results: For the policy discourse, the EO argues “aliens” threaten public safety. It further argues that increased immigration enforcement and the defunding of sanctuary jurisdictions would make communities safer, benefiting all Americans. As a counter-discourse, we posit this EO is detrimental to Latino immigrant communities. Additionally, past research demonstrates immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and that sanctuary cities are safer than non-sanctuary cities.

Conclusion and Implications: Findings demonstrate that this EO is guided by racist narratives about Latino immigrants. It is crucial and urgent for social workers to be present and engaged with the current realities of Latino immigrants as it relates to their documentation status, negative interaction with U.S.law enforcement, and the anti-immigrant political environment to develop culturally appropriate interventions. This law will (re)establish barriers to seeking social services due to an amplified fear of persecution. Also, the threat to revoke federal funding in sanctuary jurisdictions would deny opportunities to further develop and strengthen low-income communities that are inhabited by not only foreign-born and undocumented residents, but native-born residents as well. We call on social workers to engage in socially just and anti-oppressive responses to the EO and all U.S. policies alike in their practice and research.