By Carolina Valdivia 

This article centers on the experiences of an understudied segment of the undocumented population: individuals who reenter the United States post-deportation without authorization and their family members. The state classifies unauthorized reentry after deportation as a criminal offense rather than a civil violation, thereby designating these individuals as felons. On the basis of 113 in-depth interviews with undocumented returnees and their relatives, I find that this criminal labeling leads families to internalize a sense of criminality, experience intensified fear and anxiety, and adopt more extreme strategies to evade detection. Their experiences are a prime example of what I term hyper-illegality—an enduring condition of legal precarity or liminal status whereby individuals are permanently marked by conditional inclusion and heightened vulnerability to state surveillance and punishment.

By Ángel A. Escamilla García, Adriana M. Cerón

Research on post-deportation experiences has shown that family separation, especially separation from children and partners, shapes deported migrants’ intentions to return to the US. Yet little is known about how these intentions intersect with other aspects of the remigration experience. In this article, we examine deported Central American adults’ intentions to reenter the US undetected and the transit experiences of those attempting to return while traversing Mexico. Drawing on survey data from the Encuesta Sobre Migración en la Frontera Sur de México (EMIF Sur), combined with ethnographic and interview data from recently deported Central Americans traveling through Mexico, we find that deported migrants who have left behind minor children in the US are more likely to intend to return to the US—particularly those who are separated from a partner or are a single parent. In turn, the eagerness and urgency to return to their families in the US shape the way deported migrants approach their journeys through Mexico. These results underscore the central role of family in shaping remigration and highlight the broader consequences of US border externalization policies operating within Mexico.

By: Youngjin Stephanie Hong, Marci Ybarra, Angela S. García. 

Studies link intensified immigration enforcement to reduced safety net participation among mixed-status families, but less is known about how this varies by settlement duration. Bridging research on immigrant settlement and system avoidance, we theorize that the impacts are strongest among immigrants with shorter US residency. To test this, we analyze whether exposure to deportation threat, measured as removals under Secure Communities per one thousand noncitizens, is associated with safety net use among citizen children of likely undocumented Latinas in California, using a two-way fixed effects regression. We find that increased removal rates are negatively related to the child’s participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; Medicaid; and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families among mothers with less than five years of residency, but not among those with longer durations, relative to US-born mothers. These findings suggest that deportation threat may be especially burdensome for recent arrivals.

By J. Jacob Kirksey, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj

This study investigates the impact of the 2018 immigration raid at Load Trail LLC, a trailer manufacturing company in Sumner, Texas. It analyzes the raid’s severe and enduring effects on the postsecondary pathways of students in the surrounding areas. Situated within the broader discourse on legal vulnerability, this research highlights how exposure to immigration enforcement operations and pervasive anti-immigrant sentiments contributes to diminished educational opportunities. Using robust longitudinal data from Texas, the findings indicate pronounced declines in four-year college enrollment and shifts toward employment during high school, particularly among Latinx and English-learner students. These results delineate the extensive collateral consequences of immigration enforcement on community members not directly targeted by the raid. By documenting the raid’s deleterious effects on both immediate educational engagement and longer-term career prospects, this article calls for targeted policy measures designed to buffer the negative impacts and support the resilience and upward mobility of affected student populations.

By Cora Bennett, Virginia Graves, Benjamin Meadows 

Federal immigration statutes are enforced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, ICE enforcement does not occur in a vacuum; it has a well-documented legacy of spillovers. Understanding the actual behaviors of immigration enforcement is exceedingly difficult owing to opaque or unavailable data. In this article, we are able to match the level of local immigration enforcement in local areas to school-district-level elementary and middle school achievement scores. Specifically, we merge ten years of individual-arrest ICE records from the New Orleans district field office obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request to district-level achievement scores to understand how immigration enforcement affects the human capital of children. We find that overall responses to enforcement as measured by district-level achievement scores are sharp and large, with achievement scores dropping anywhere between 0.27 and 0.52 of a standard deviation.

By Agustina Laurito, Ashley N. Muchow 

Deportations of immigrants from the United States have grown substantially over the past two decades. While existing research has examined how changes to US laws and policies have contributed to this increase, less attention has been given to how conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin shape deportation patterns. This article investigates how an important external shock—home-country natural disasters—influences immigrant removals from the US. We combine annual data on removals by country with information on natural disasters to estimate difference-in-differences models that exploit exogenous variation in the timing and magnitude of natural disasters across countries. Our results show that immigrant removals increased, on average, by 29 percent after salient natural disasters. When we explore mechanisms, we find little evidence that home-country natural disasters increase irregular migration, but we do find that noncitizen and likely undocumented immigrants increase their labor force participation and employment following these shocks. This finding suggests that natural disasters in immigrants’ countries of origin may influence the economic behavior of immigrants, putting them at greater risk of detection by immigration enforcement authorities.

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.

By Ian G. Peacock 

I examine how social influence shapes both the adoption and implementation of 287(g) agreements—federal-local contracts that deputize local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. Drawing on organizational theory, the article highlights the role of public official associations (POAs) in diffusing interest in these agreements across counties. Using data on application letters and quasi-experimental methods, the study shows that counties with stronger ties to POAs were more likely to express interest in 287(g) agreements and to imitate language used by peer jurisdictions. It then links this imitation to variation in enforcement intensity: Counties that closely copied others’ applications were more likely to escalate their institutional commitment, including devoting more jail space to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees, complying with ICE detainer requests at higher rates, and becoming more central to ICE’s detainee transfer network. This suggests that social influence may shape not only entry into immigration enforcement but also its long-term implementation.

By Caitlin Patler, Bradford Jones 

The United States is unique in the size and scope of its deportation system. Between 2001 and 2022, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out nearly 6.5 million deportations. Deportation is often framed as a singular event that happens to an individual. We conceptualize deportation more broadly as a system that encompasses premigration, within-US, and post-deportation contexts and outcomes. In this introduction, we explain this conceptualization, establishing the existence of differential paths into the deportation system that begin even prior to migration, depending on migrants’ access to paths to legal entry, which are shaped by political and economic factors. We then review multidisciplinary literature on the implications of the deportation system for individuals, families, and communities in the United States, as well as for the US economy, politics, and political outcomes. Finally, we review research on post-deportation outcomes in countries of origin and how deportation can lead to remigration to the United States, thus rebooting the deportation system. While a broad and interdisciplinary literature has helped illuminate the deportation system, there is still much to learn. To that end, we end with a description of the contributions of this issue and directions and challenges for future research.

By the U..S. SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE.  MINORITY REPORT

For decades, the enforcement of U.S. immigration law has required coordination with foreign governments. But it has never before played such a central and transactional role in American foreign policy. This report finds that the Trump Administration has expanded and institutionalized a system in which the United States urges or coerces countries to accept migrants who are not their citizens, often through arrangements that are costly, wasteful and poorly monitored. Deporting migrants to countries they have no connection to—once a rare tool used only in exceptional circumstances—has become a routine instrument of diplomacy. This report finds that this shift has had three central consequences: First, the Administration’s use of third country deportations is coming at great taxpayer cost. The United States has spent tens of millions of dollars to move a relatively small number of individuals to third countries, some of whom, after being flown thousands of miles, are then flown back to their home country, again on U.S.-funded flights. In many cases, migrants could have been returned directly to their countries of origin, avoiding unnecessary flights and additional costs. Instead, taxpayers are funding a global deportation network that is little more than an expensive deterrent with no measurable benefit.Second, the Administration is conducting questionable deals by making direct payments primarily to corrupt and unstable foreign governments with track records of public corruption, human rights abuses and human trafficking, relying on assurances that these countries will comply with certain obligations. Yet there is no evidence the State Department is monitoring how U.S. funds are used, tracking the treatment of deportees or enforcing the terms of these agreements. In some cases, U.S. officials have been instructed not to follow up at all. This is not disciplined enforcement; it is outsourcing responsibility to governments the United States itself does not trust. Third, the Administration is not being transparent with Congress or the American people about the extent of its deal-making with foreign governments that agree to take in migrants, including what additional pressures and sweeteners it may be applying or offering up. Even where there are formal agreements with countries, questions remain about whether the Administration has made side deals or is providing other forms of U.S. assistance or favorable treatment. While distinct from third country deportations, the Administration has shown that in pursuit of its deportation agenda, it is even willing to cut deals with adversarial governments like Iran. Under secretive arrangements, the Administration has forcibly deported Iranians, including vulnerable individuals such as religious minorities and political dissidents. There is no transparency around the full terms of these arrangements with foreign governments and whether these deals have come at the expense of advancing more pressing U.S. national security interests. Taken together, these practices reflect a troubling shift in how the United States is exercising power. Deportation is being used as a bargaining chip. U.S. diplomacy is being conducted through secret cash payments and quiet concessions. Countries are being pressured with threats of tariffs, visa bans or cuts to assistance. Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent without meaningful oversight or accountability. And speed and deterrence are being prioritized over due process and respect for human rights. At a time when the Administration is already straining its relationships with longstanding allies, it is building transactional relationships with corrupt and adversarial regimes—not around shared interests or strategic goals, but opaque deals that do not serve American taxpayers or American security. As Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we believe Congress has a responsibility to understand how U.S. foreign policy is being conducted, how taxpayer funds are being used and whether the Administration’s actions strengthen or undermine American interests.