Inside the Jail: Processing Immigrants for Removal

In this chapter, I focus on the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office, and its management of immigrant subjects. I show how officers categorize, sort, and process removable immigrants for deportation. In doing so, they bring the power and techniques of the state inside the jail, expanding the federal government’s deportation infrastructure and enhancing its capacity to expel unwanted members of the polity. Although the rote aspects of bureaucratic processing threaten to subsume immigrants’ humanity, officers inevitably confront stories of tragedy and human suffering. Not everyone the state seeks to deport is “deserving” of removal. The discourses and practices at work in the jail reveal the contradictions that lie at the heart of the state’s coercive regulatory authority.