Unpacking the Politics of the US Deportation System

By Tina Law 

There is a growing multidisciplinary effort to understand the political causes and consequences of the US deportation system amid rapidly changing policies and significant data limitations. I contribute to this timely work by considering how interactions between an increasingly empowered executive branch and a politically polarized Congress shape deportation policymaking. I apply a policy feedback approach, a theoretical lens that analyzes policies and polities as co-constitutive, and construct a novel dataset to computationally analyze how Congressmembers publicly responded on Twitter to the Trump administration’s implementation and suspension of the family separation policy in 2018, during which migrant parents were prosecuted and detained separately from their children. Findings suggest that Republican and Democratic Congressmembers are unlikely to respond to executive assertions of power on deportation, even when policies are highly unpopular among the public. This raises concerns about shared governance on deportation policy and its implications for migration and democracy.