Book review: Amada Armenta, Protect, Serve, Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement
| Author | Greg Prieto |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617743875 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617743875
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(2) 279 –291
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617743875
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Book reviews
Amada Armenta, Protect, Serve, Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement, University
of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2017; 212 pp.: 9780520296305, $34.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Greg Prieto, University of San Diego, USA
Devolution—the process by which the federal government delegates its immigration
enforcement responsibilities to local police—is arguably the most distinctive feature of
the contemporary deportation regime. As the distinction between local police depart-
ments (PD) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) blurs, deportation is trans-
formed from a federal project to a local preoccupation. If a prior generation of immigrants
tacitly understood that so long as your clandestine entry was not detected, the risk of
deportation ended at the border, the present generation understands that deportability is
a local and daily risk. Amada Armenta’s gripping ethnography addresses local law
enforcement’s collaboration with immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee,
opening a window into the poorly understood processes by which local police act as
proxies for ICE and how, in their everyday police work, officers participate in the raciali-
zation and criminalization of undocumented immigrants.
The scope of Armenta’s ethnography offers the reader a wide view of the deportation
pipeline. She integrates observations and interviews with the deputies of the Davidson
County Sheriff’s Office (DCSO) who perform immigration screenings; ride-alongs with
the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) who serve as the initial point of entry
to the deportation pipeline for immigrant residents; and immigrant residents who articu-
late their sense of violation for being racially profiled and deported for minor violations.
Though officers may exhibit good intentions and go to lengths to do their job humanely
and respectfully—even going so far as to establish community relations programming
(see her discussion of the El Protector program profiled in Chapter 4)—the outcome
remains the same: dragnet-style policing drives up deportations and drives down coop-
eration and trust between immigrants and local police.
As Armenta makes clear in a historical overview, local municipalities have long been
involved in immigration policymaking and enforcement, though federal preemption
steadily became the norm over time. More recently, however, the line between the federal
and local enforcement practices has blurred. Though the statutory authority for these col-
laborative programs was established in 1996, the widespread exercise of this authority
743875TCR0010.1177/1362480617743875Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews
book-review2017
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