Fight for the City: Policing, Sanctuary, and Resistance in Chicago

abstract

In the months following Trump’s 2016 election as U.S. president, scores of cities across the United States instituted or reaffirmed “sanctuary” measures that impede federal immigration enforcement actions in their midst. Yet in the heart of these “sanctuary” cities, many immigrants remain vulnerable to deportation. This article describes one community campaign to identify, track, and stop a mechanism through which urban immigrants are detained and deported: data sharing between local police agencies and federal immigration officials. We draw on Kyle Walker’s (2015) framework of place, scale, and networks of local immigration politics to show how overlapping scales of immigrant policing ultimately jeopardized Chicago’s promise to be a place of immigrant sanctuary. We then describe how community organizers exploited this tension as they exposed the effects of Chicago police data sharing practices on black and Latinx Chicagoans and campaigned for a stronger city sanctuary policy.

Keywords:

• Chicago
• deportation
• immigrant rights
• policing
• sanctuary

Acknowledgments

We thank Celene Adame, Wilmer Catalán-Ramírez, and all the members of Organized Communities Against Deportation. We also thank BYP 100 and the Policing in Chicago Research Group for their work.

Notes

1. In this essay, we use the term “immigrant” to refer to non-citizens born outside of but currently residing in the United States, regardless of their legal status. This usage is problematic, since “immigrant” technically presupposes legal admission to the United States for purposes of permanent residency. Nevertheless, when we are speaking of people who are settled in the United States for the long-term, we avoid “migrant” because it gives an impression of mobility or transience. Following common usage in the immigrant rights movement, we use the term “undocumented” to describe people living in the United States without a lawful immigration status or with a temporary or conditional status, such as DACA. Following Bauder 2016, we use “illegalized” to refer to the exercise of state power on people who are denied lawful status.

2. The degree to which these policies have deterred federal immigration enforcement measures of the Trump administration is somewhat debatable. To date, organizers in Chicago report that a variety of measures, including sanctuary policies and community resistance, has blunted the severity of raids that have devastated immigrant communities in other areas of the country (Pratt and Coen 2017). Yet, the Trump administration has also repeatedly threatened to target sanctuary cities with additional enforcement programs and personnel.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [1823392].