ICE in the Heartland: Community Impacts of Worksite Immigration Raids
ICE in the Heartland (click here to visit the external website) developed in response to a large increase in worksite immigration raids conducted during the Trump administration. Researchers on the project team, who had written about deportation and immigration raids in the past, fielded numerous calls from reporters and carefully monitored the public discussion about raids. This led to two conclusions:
First, the public understanding of immigration raids is extremely limited. While some reporters–most often Spanish-speakers with contacts in local communities–considered longer term impacts in the years following raids, the general public discussion in the English-speaking, non-immigrant discourse summarized the impacts of raids as the number of people removed on the day the raid occurred. This is certainly not the whole story.
Second, this story is not ours to tell, or at least not ours to tell alone. Rather, it is the families and communities hit by immigration raids who can best describe their impacts.
This project is our attempt to center impacted communities as the story-tellers of immigration raids, with the collaboration of a wide range of community organizers, graduate and undergraduate students at the Universities of Michigan and Iowa, and two brilliant artist/activists. Visit the About page to learn more about the research team and process.
The takeaway message: Stories of immigration enforcement are complicated, intricate, and traumatic. It takes a collaborative team of storytellers deeply engaged in the work to tell their stories. Researchers, the media, advocates, and communities all have a role in developing and centering these stories.
