Harney Lecture Series: On the Front Line of Immigration Enforcement

The United States government is constructing a prodigious deportation machine. This apparatus is sustained by a proliferation of newly issued executive orders, policy memoranda, agency directives, and other similar paper. The goal? To “legally” sanction the removal of more than 10 million undocumented and mostly Spanish-speaking people.

 

This talk considered this accumulation of “legal” paper as an archive comprised of racialized crisis narratives.  And as an archive, it possesses the authority to license otherwise unlawful policies and practices of exclusion. With this in mind, and informed by his professional experience in the borderlands, Luis Campos examined (1) rapidly surging immigration incarceration and (2) the evisceration of asylum law and similar humanitarian protections.

 

Luis Campos is a U.S. lawyer, former Assistant Professor of Law (UNB), and a U of T Faculty of Law alum (LL.M. And S.J.D.).  In the United States, he focuses his legal practice on asylum law, deportation defense, and immigration detention.  He currently splits his time between Sun Valley, Idaho (where he is the Legal Director of the Alliance of Idaho) and Tucson, Arizona (where he spends the majority of his time, donating his services to immigrants and refugees, as well as to Human Rights NGOs and Community Defense groups in the Arizona Borderland region). Luis is on the frontline of the legal battle over extreme immigration enforcement measures. He previously worked along the Texas-Mexico border, where he represented refugee mothers seeking reunification with children separated by the U.S. government.