Administrative Violence in Immigration Law

Résumé

This is a conference about violence in the administration of the United States immigration laws. In this context, agency violence is commonly defined in terms of the use or threat of force against immigrants and immigrant communities—i.e., through apprehension, detention, and removal. This conference develops and defends a related theory of violence, what I call administrative violence, which focuses on benefits programs that offer relief from removal. These programs foist the burden of seeking relief on migrants, obfuscating the realities that relief is temporary, limited, and hard to get, and draws attention away from the ways that relief programs are intertwined—politically, legally, and administratively—with the enforcement programs most responsible for egregious harms stemming from direct violence. The theory of administrative violence makes two contributions. First, it provides descriptive clarity on the range of illegitimate harms experienced by migrants at the hands of both field agents wielding quasi-police power as well as bureaucrats processing papers in anonymous office buildings. Second, it offers a way to push forward current conversations about the scope of agency power, which has tended to overlook the range of harms flowing from agency adjudications.

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Conférencier

Stephen Lee, University of California, Irvine School of Law

Organisé par

Chaire de recherche du Canada sur la Gouvernance sécuritaire des corps, la mobilité et les frontières (GSCMF) – Anne-Marie D’Aoust (titulaire) en partenariat avec la Chaire Raoul Dandurand et avec l’appui du CRIDAQ.