Drug prohibition and the criminalization of immigrants: The compounding of drug war disparities in the United States deportation regime.

BACKGROUND

While recent years have seen moderate progress toward more humanistic drug policy in the United States, the well-documented disproportionate incarceration of Black and Latino Americans continues largely unabated, and non-citizens are still frequently detained and deported based on drug-related crimes and violations. These processes draw from a long history of targeted drug enforcement that has served to scapegoat, punish, and exclude immigrants and native-born racial minorities, culminating in a modern War on Drugs intimately intertwined with processes of immigration and deportation. Drawing on the concept of "crimmigration"-which captures how the intertwining of criminal and immigration policy and enforcement enhances the punitive and exclusionary potential of both systems-this article examines the enduring effects of drug prohibition in the contemporary U.S. immigration and deportation regime.

METHODS

Primary data is drawn from my qualitative research on criminal deportation-including a year of ethnographic observation of removal proceedings in New York City immigration court, as well as 39 interviews with immigration lawyers, criminal lawyers, and advocates. These are supplemented by a review of relevant policy, as well as existing research on drug-crime-based deportation.

RESULTS

I argue that drug-related deportation from the United States is a key example of a "crimmigration" connection bolstered by the ongoing societal scapegoating of immigrants for the social problems of drugs and crime. Drug-related deportation, and the immigration court policies and processes that surround it, serve to reproduce and intensify racial and ethnic inequalities inherent to the domestic War on Drugs, while also sending uniquely vulnerable migrants to countries rife with violence attributable to the international apparatuses of that same War.

CONCLUSION

Findings suggest a need for concurrent reforms to drug and immigration policy in order to truly mitigate the drastic impacts of the enduring U.S. War on Drugs.