Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance

Until recently, the southern U.S. border dominated most discussions of immigration, but public health scholar Lopez (Separated) argues in this prescient account that ICE raids on workplaces are the system’s true locus. Their intentional cruelty and chaotic execution are designed, he argues, to exploit fault lines “across race, class, language, and immigration status” by dehumanizing and disappearing Latino workers, destroying their families, and forcing their dependents out of the country. He explains how this came to be: as American-born workers refused jobs in dangerous, exploitative industries, immigrants filled those roles. “For ICE, the industrialization of jobs such as meatpacking conveniently clustered large numbers of Latino immigrants” in “a facility with too few doors for... workers to attempt to flee,” enabling “large-scale immigration worksite raids.” Ironically, he explains, worksite raids were first implemented in 2006 by President George W. Bush as a way of focusing on the employers of undocumented immigrants, not the immigrants themselves. Instead, such raids function to “maintain a class of exploitable workers,” as well as to “discourage” outsiders from advocating for immigrant communities “lest they be mired in... concentrated human suffering.” Full of heartrending interviews with those left behind as they reckon with broken families and loss, Lopez’s account is also a valuable primer on ICE’s powers. It’s a timely and harrowing account. (Sept.)