Disappeared in plain sight: ICE air deportation infrastructure and cycles of migrant (im)mobility

ABSTRACT

This article argues that aviation infrastructures utilized by ICE Air Operations for deportations should be understood as texts that materialize rhetorical borders and anti-migrant discourses. Deportation flights originating from King County International Airport provide one vantage point into common spatial and structural tactics ICE deploys to obfuscate and expand vast infrastructural networks of migrant control. Infrastructures of forced movement generated by ICE Air Operations transform airplanes into mobile sites of migrant detention that are paradoxically both rhetorically obscured and hypervisible, produce weaponized absences and informational gaps around deportations, and trap migrants in exploitative cycles of simultaneous forced mobility and immobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant
• infrastructure
• deportation
• mobility
• immigration

Notes

1 University of Washington Center for Human Rights, Hidden in Plain Sight: King County Collaboration with ICE Air Deportation Flights at Boeing Field, April 23, 2019, https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2019/04/23/ice-air-king-county/.

2 Angelika Albaladejo, “Florida Companies are Cashing in On Deportation Flights—About $35,000 Per Deportee,” The Miami Herald, July 30, 2020, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article244596542.html?fbclid=IwAR1j7FaQxvvleAt-HH0Tea4p3MjccDC9eLrlveN7FakVt2fmdsUZM3E1aDU.

3 Catherine E. Shoichet and Curt Merrill, “ICE Air: How US Deportation Flights Work,” CNN, January 17, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/26/us/ice-air-deportation-flights-explainer/index.html.

4 D. Robert DeChaine, “Introduction: For Rhetorical Border Studies,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 1.

5 Michael Lechuga, “Coding Intensive Movement with Technologies of Visibility: Alien Affect,” Capacious: A Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2017): 84.

6 Ibid., 85.

7 Ibid., 94.

8 Kent Ono, “Borders That Travel,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 20.

9 Ibid., 20–1.

10 Gloria Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Aída Hurtado, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012).

11 Nancy Hiemstra, Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2019).

12 Ibid., 89.

13 Ibid., 96–7.

14 Albaladejo, “Florida Companies are Cashing In.”

15 Karma Chávez, “Border Interventions: The Need to Shift from a Rhetoric of Security to a Rhetoric of Militarization,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 55–8.

16 Stacey K. Sowards and Richard D. Pineda, “Immigrant Narratives and Popular Culture in the United States: Border Spectacle, Unmotivated Sympathies, and Individualized Responsibilities,” Western Journal of Communication 77, no. 1 (2013): 72–91.

17 William Walters, “The Flight of the Deported: Aircraft, Deportation, and Politics,” Geopolitics 21, no. 2 (2016): 435–58.

18 Jasmine Vazin, Toxic Detention: The Trend of Contamination in the American Immigration System (Santa Barbara: University of California Santa Barbara Global Environmental Justice Project, 2019), https://gejp.es.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.envs.d7_gejp-2/files/sitefiles/publication/GEJP%20Special%20Report%202019.pdf.

19 Nina Shapiro, “Inside SeaTac Prison: How Many Detainees Are Separated from Their Children?” The Seattle Times, June 11, 2018, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/immigration-advocates-try-to-determine-how-many-detainees-at-seatac-prison-are-separated-from-children/.

20 Antonio De La Garza and Bryan Walsh, “¡No Olvidado! 21st-Century U.S. Military Violence and the Politics of Remembering Missing Migrants Along US–Mexico Borderlands,” Border-Lines 11 (2019): 4–5.

21 Walters, 2016, “The Flight of the Deported,” 436.

22 Ibid.

23 William Walters, “Aviation as Deportation Infrastructure: Airports, Planes, and Expulsion,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 16 (2018): 5.

24 Ibid., 6.

25 Esmy Jimenez, “3 Ways Boeing Field is Preventing ‘ICE Air’ from Deporting Immigrants,” KUOW, April 24, 2019, https://www.kuow.org/stories/boeing-field-makes-moves-to-ban-ice-deportation-flights.

26 De La Garza and Walsh, “¡No Olvidado!,” 17.

27 Walters, “Aviation,” 15.

28 Chantal Da Silva, “United, Delta and American Airlines Used for More Than 1,000 Deportation Flights to Central America in 2019,” Newsweek, January 31, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/united-delta-american-airlines-deportation-flights-central-america-1484940.

29 Ibid.

30 Walters, “The Flight of the Deported,” 443–4.

31 University of Washington Center for Human Rights, Hidden in Plain Sight.

32 Ibid.

33 Walters, “The Flight of the Deported,” 444.

34 Nick Miroff, “ICE Air: Shackled Deportees, Air Freshener and Cheers. America’s One-Way Trip Out,” August 10, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ice-air-shackled-deportees-air-freshener-and-cheers-americas-one-way-trip-out/2019/08/10/bc5d2d36-babe-11e9-aeb2-a101a1fb27a7_story.html.

35 Lechuga, “Coding Intensive Movement.”