Punishing Illegality

This chapter argues that there are two worlds of immigration policing, addressing the remarkable gap between law enforcements’ perception of its policing activities vis-à-vis Latino residents, and Latino residents’ perception of their practices. It shows the foundation for these divergent perspectives. When police evaluate their relationship with Latino immigrants, they draw from a universe of experiences: the department has a Latino community outreach initiative, not all interactions between Latinos and the police are adversarial, and officers routinely cite Latinos who they could choose to arrest. Thus, police marshal an assortment of department practices to argue that they care about serving the Latino community. In practice, Latino residents draw on their lived experiences as residents who feel hyper-policed to repudiate these efforts as insincere. The chapter examines whether procedural justice is possible when low level arrests can result in deportation.