Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis

Policing Our Border, Policing Our Nation: An Examination of the Ideological Connections between Border Vigilantism and U.S. National Ideology

181 Policing Our Border, Policing Our Nation An Examination of the Ideological Connections between Border Vigilantism and U.S. National Ideology jodie m. lawston and ruben r. murillo In February 2009 Maricopa County’s notorious sheriff, Joe Arpaio, staged a chain-­ gang-­ style parade of two hundred undocumented people down the streets of Phoenix.1 Pictures of the parade disseminated in the media featured mostly Latino men—shackled at the feet and hands and clothed in old-­ fashioned black-­ and-­ white-­ striped prison uniforms—flanked by an array of burly, shotgun-­ wielding officers dressed in commando garb. The spectacularly punitive and martial images were orchestrated to convey the message that Sheriff Joe is willing and able to go above and beyond the status quo of twenty-­ first-­ century law enforcement; apparently, present law does not treat immigrants and incarcerated people harshly enough. While some may dismiss Arpaio’s antics as aberrant or as a publicity stunt, it is important to situate his tactics in the broader anti-­ immigrant context and a longer U.S. history of chain gangs, lynchings, and posses, all of which are inherently racist. Mainstream understandings of white supremacy usually focus on extremists like the Ku Klux Klan or other blatant hate groups. There is more to it than that, though. We define white supremacy as “the real material, institutional, and structural forces that have been deployed to facilitate the accumulation of political, social, and economic power specifically for whites.” Such forces include slave labor, legalized segregation, Federal Housing Administration (fha) redlining, miscegenation laws, unequal distribution of educational resources, and numerous other forms of racialized inclusion 182 • jodie m. lawston and ruben r. murillo and exclusion. The law and its apparatuses—the police, court, and penal systems —historically have been deployed to establish and then perpetuate white supremacy. For example, the 1790 congressional act which legislated that only whites could naturalize as U.S. citizens established a telling precursor to present immigration law. Given this social and political function of the law, it is not surprising that present-­ day vigilante groups turn to discourses of legality to target racialized immigrants. In many ways, Arpaio’s parade mirrors the tactics, motives, and logic of present-­ day anti-­ immigrant vigilante groups like the Minuteman Project, Ranch Rescue, American Border Patrol, and the Civil Homeland Defense Corps. The tactics of Arpaio and such vigilante groups—who also dress in military-­ style attire and sometimes wield guns2 —both rely on creating a spectacle as they roam along the border or search ranches for undocumented migrants .3 Interestingly, the word “vigilante” has a highly visual dimension, as it derives from the Latin, meaning “watchful”; however, there is no evidence that vigilante tactics reduce undocumented immigration into the United States. Likewise, increased militarization of the U.S.-­ Mexico border has failed to reduce unauthorized immigration.4 The motives for their activities, then, must lie elsewhere. In this chapter we locate the motives of the aggressive and punitive nature of both vigilante groups and Sheriff Arpaio within a history of racial domination. We show that both Arpaio and vigilante groups are logical extensions of a white supremacist national formation. Treating them as anything but extensions of white supremacy legitimizes U.S. migration policy, which is inhumane, exploitative, and deadly. Following the logics of racial domination, one motive of Arpaio and vigilante groups is to intimidate and instill fear in migrants and Latino/as, who, even when U.S. citizens, are racially profiled.5 However, Arpaio and vigilante groups insist repeatedly that they only aim to enforce the law. Jim Gilchrist—who founded the Minuteman Project in 2004—explains on his website that he “is only one of millions of twenty-­ first century minutemen/women/children who want the United States to remain governed by the ‘rule of law’ and who want proactive enforcement of our national security protections and our immigration legal code.”6 Chris Simcox—founder of the Civil Homeland Defense Corps in Arizona in 2002 and, later, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps—claims he is merely working to protect national security and American sovereignty;7 his mission is “to secure United States borders and coastal boundaries against unlawful and unauthorized entry of all individuals, contraband, and foreign military.”8 Finally, Arpaio claims that he is only enforcing the laws of Arizona and “serving the public.”9 In a 2008 interview, the sheriff defended his demean- Policing Our Border, Policing Our...