ICE in the Heartland: Documenting Community Response to Immigration Work Raids at the University of Michigan School of Public Health
This is a jointly authored essay by Guadalupe Cervantes, a first year MPH Candidate in the department of Health Management and Policy, and Nourel-hoda Eidy, a fourth-year student pursuing a B.A in Community and Global Public Health. Coming from resilient immigrant families, we witnessed our communities being targeted and othered by law enforcement entities. As we navigate spaces that have historically excluded our communities, we recognize the importance of representation as two young women with distinct Hispanic and Arab features. While law enforcement continue to target our marginalized communities, we strengthen ourselves by becoming more aware of the local impact their presence has. One of the best ways we know how to protect ourselves and our communities is through continuous knowledge and advocacy. We chose public health because it focuses on helping communities at large while simultaneously addressing the larger socio-ecological issues at hand. As first generation students and leaders, the opportunity to contribute to the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement (DCC) Project allows us to intersect scholarly work with community advocacy, preparing us to enact real-world interventions to work toward health equity.
Our project within DCC consists of documenting the community response efforts of six large-scale immigration work raids that occurred in 2018. The project is led by Drs. William Lopez and Nicole Novak of the University of Michigan School of Public Health and the University of Iowa College of Public Health. We focus on documenting immigration enforcement activities, the impacts of this enforcement on mixed-status communities, and advocate responses to the enforcement, across all six sites (Sumner, Texas; Salem, Ohio; Sandusky, Ohio; Bean Station, Tennessee; Mount Pleasant, Iowa; and O’Neil, Nebraska). Collectively, our team has conducted semi-structured interviews at each raid site with community members who responded to the raids, some of whom were detained themselves or were family and friends of those detained. We have classified responders of the raid into four categories: faith leaders, legal aid, Latinx/immigrant advocate, and teachers. Prior to the start of each interview, we walked interviewees through a consent form. The consent form detailed transparency and protections of the interviewee including the purpose of the research, coding of their name and names of others they would mention through using pseudonyms, and that they were free to stop the interview at any time. After, we would transcribe each interview and through this we are able to learn more about the community’s needs in the aftermath and the structural injustices in place. However, there were still gaps that needed to be filled so we collected and coded public reports (newspapers, videos, ICE documents, etc.). We gathered information on: detention center conditions, case updates, demographics of those detained, advocacy efforts, and economic, health and familial impacts, etc.
Using all our data, we are able to draw comparisons of immigration enforcement and community response patterns across all the sites. Our final product will be a digital archive that will serve as an educational platform. It will narrate the six raids and their impact on the daily lives of mixed-status families. To elaborate, it will convey the heightened fear of community members for their loved ones detained but also fear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) returns. Additionally, the archive will provide resources for at risk communities, advocates, and detainees; as well as support the media in describing the impact of immigration raids. The archive is likely to attract those interested in incarceration and the policies and activism surrounding the topic, as well as scholars intending to use the work to guide other projects, research, teachings, etc. However, it will also be available to the general public, thus we want to present our work in a way that engages the different audiences and is user friendly.
Aside from the archive, we aim to educate the general public on our research. One local way this takes form is by aiding Dr. Lopez, during his talks on Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, his new book which touches upon the intersectionality of immigration and police violence. This is a great way for us to reflect on our research experiences and showcase our creativity through poetry. Through this, we have been successful in engaging the audience in discussions about the ways in which the police and ICE use horrid tactics to dehumanize and lure in communities of color. Most importantly, it is a way to shift the discussion from an issue of “them” to an issue of “us” as we also touch upon the economic repercussions of incarceration.
Beyond just the general public, we aim to continuously engage with stakeholders to help inform our research and/or to help expand our collaborations. Creating relationships with trusted stakeholders in the community has been and continues to be essential to our work. One group in particular that have profoundly shaped our work are rural raid response advocates, which as mentioned earlier consists of legal aid, teachers, Latinx/immigrant advocates, and faith leaders. Mixed-status communities often seclude themselves out of fear, and these individuals noted above are central to reaching these communities. Our hope is that our connections will further aid us in the disbursement of our finalized archive among those impacted, as well as with other advocacy groups/communities.
In addition, our team would look forward to hosting a Q&A panel at the University of Michigan with the rural raid responders in order to inform our campus community of our work and the importance of issues we are aiming to tackle. If our archive is completed, we plan to showcase it then. Looking into the future, another way to gain traction would be for DCC to host a large event that brings together the advocates and stakeholders of the various DCC projects, as well as the general public. This would allow individuals to speak about their own work and methods, as well as give advice for others doing the same type of work. More importantly, this will shed light on issues that may not be originally thought of as intersectional and may foster future collaboration. Individuals will be able to see how various issues, like immigration, are mutifacid.
To continue, we should also utilize social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. Many advocate groups, scholars, and politicians are leveraging these platforms to communicate about important issues. More so, trending topics in the media are often issues that we already focus on: police brutality, imprisonment, detention, immigration activity and enforcement, children separation, etc. In addition, those with a large social media following are able to start a discussion and mobilize individuals, not just from the initial area of impact, but from all over the nation. Even with a small following one can gain traction on an issue by asking their followers to share or repost/retweet their original post; there is power in numbers. As a team, we plan to distribute our archive via these social media platforms.
As the various DCC teams continue to consider the corruption of the system of mass incarceration, it is important we understand that the ways in which we enforce immigration policies in mixed-status communities connects to the way we police certain populations. For example, the justification of police brutality among African American males are often mirrored among men of the Latinx community. More so when communities are terrorized, there are no stark differences between ICE agents, local police, or state police; they all spark fear. This is later translated into mistrust of government and local agencies. Given the complexities of these issues, we hope our continued efforts help draw comparisons across communities. Lastly, we are grateful for the opportunities we have been given, and look forward to ending mass incarceration of marginalized individuals as future public health leaders.
