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In this article, I examine two sites of the contemporary illegality industry in the United States: the ICE Field Office and the Immigration Court. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic engagement, including accompaniment and observations in a regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office and an Executive Office of Immigration Reform (EOIR) Court, I trace how human interactions and social relations in each of these bureaucratic sites structure and reinforce conditions of precarity, insecurity, and marginality among undocumented and asylum seeking people in the United States. In both sites, the enforcement power of the state is visible through the configurations of bureaucratic processes and the structures of interactions between migrants and federal government officials. Examining these two sites from the vantage point of engaged ethnography, I illustrate how routine, bureaucratic encounters (re)produce illegality and exclusion by enacting violence against migrants through the powers of surveillance and administrative monitoring, and the threat of deportation and family separation. I also reflect on the political potential that emerges through activist anthropology and accompaniment with migrants in sites of state violence.
Key words: illegality, ICE, immigration court, deportation, accompaniment
Introduction: Entanglements in the United States Illegality Industry
Inside the revolving glass door of a nondescript federal office building in downtown Eugene, Oregon, a small university city, migrants file through a security checkpoint to await their monthly check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Clutching well-worn immigration papers, sometimes with electronic monitors locked around their ankles, adults hush children while everyone waits in a crowded hallway for their name to be called. Despite the particulars of their migration histories-while most people here are asylum seekers, others have been paroled from detention, others are Green card applicants or Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders-and beyond the differences in national origin and ethnic background-while a majority of migrants at the Eugene Field Office are Central American and Mexican, there are also East and West Africans, Central Europeans, and others-everyone in line for an ICE check-in is in a precarious position vis-a-vis the United States immigration enforcement regime. Migrants complying with convoluted and ever-changing immigration rules have witnessed others taken into detention by ICE officers during routine checkins at the end of this very hallway. Families have entered the building intact and departed separated, a...