Martinez‐Aranda, M. G. (2020). Collective liminality: The spillover effects of indeterminate detention on immigrant families. Law & Society Review, 54(4), 755-787.
In this article, I address the question: How do immigrant families experience the indeterminate confinement of detained loved ones under the intensified threat of deportation? I find that family units endure collateral consequences when they are suspended in a heightened state of liminality due to their loved one’s indeterminate detention. From the moment that an immigrant is processed into detention, they and their families enter a state of liminality that exists between two outcomes: release into the US (temporary or permanent) or deportation to their country of origin. A conceptual contribution of my article is the development of collective liminality to show how being suspended in this state of purgatory harms both detained immigrants and their loved ones. Although the threat of deportation is ever-present in and harmful to immigrant communities, when a loved one is detained, the threat of deportation intensifies from “if” to “when.” No longer avoiding contact with ICE, the family unit must now mobilize to protect the detained relative from impending exile.
In this article, I demonstrate how intensive state surveillance creates a condition of “extended punishment” that shapes the daily experiences of shackled immigrants. EM marks its wearer with a criminal stigma, leading that person to become shunned, including by previously supportive members of their co-ethnic community. The technology’s governmental surveillance power imposes state monitoring, social ostracization, and a stigmatizing label. Under this regime, EMs become tools of legal violence that yield a new axis of stratification among immigrants. Because EM unequally allocates autonomy, privacy, and resources, wearers find themselves more vulnerable and constrained than other immigrants.
Martinez-Aranda, M. G. (2023). Precarious legal patchworking: Detained immigrants’ access to justice. Social Problems, spad009.
In this article, I show how detained immigrants without the support of a public defender system—a feature of U.S. immigration law— face a complex immigration court that is adversarial and can produce dire consequences, including family and community exile, violence, or even death if they are deported. This paper chronicles the experiences of formerly detained immigrants and how they sought to access justice through multiple means while detained. To win their freedom from detention, they engaged in “precarious legal patchworking” (PLP), during which they haphazardly cobbled together legal resources and assistance from multiple sources, including pro-bono aid, Jailhouse Lawyers, and social networks. PLP speaks to the person’s tenacity amidst precarity, but it also unveils the fragility of this strategy because patchworking can extend detention or complicate one’s case. The lack of access to counsel is a form of legal violence, and stratifying access to representation in this way creates an underclass of people who are systematically denied justice.
Martinez-Aranda, M. G. (2023). The Impact of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Surveillance Technology on the Well-being of the Children of Immigrants. American Behavioral Scientist, 00027642231216538.
While existing scholarship examines how Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) electronic monitors (EMs) harm immigrants, less is known about the effects of these surveillance technologies on their children. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations with 39 Latin American immigrant parents monitored via EM between 2015 and 2018 in Los Angeles, California, this study asks: How do ICE’s EMs operate as surveillance tools that spill over to impact parent–child relationships and children’s well-being as their parent’s experience criminalization, punishment, and exclusion? The findings demonstrate that this supposedly “humane” alternative to detention and deportation is responsible for distinct childhood distress. Specifically, EMs impact children’s well-being in two ways: by producing fear that parents will be apprehended and deported and by functioning as visual stigmas that signal criminality and engender shame and anger. EMs also deteriorate the quality of children’s relationships in two ways: by inflicting stress and fear upon parents and by contracting children’s social networks because parents shackled to EMs often become a liability to co-ethnic community members.