ABSTRACT
Immigration enforcement has become an important site of expanded police powers to stop and search as the USA attempts to remove more unauthorised immigrants from its interior. Arizona has enthusiastically embraced this approach, treating Latino immigrants as a quasi-criminal element. State legislation requiring municipal police to engage in immigration enforcement, along with past local police practice directed at immigrant removal, strident political rhetoric, and the federal government’s own deportation initiatives, have legitimised an enforcement regimen that: (1) blends techniques of control used on the border with those used in interior enforcement; (2) mixes criminal and administrative approaches to apprehension, detention and deportation; (3) invokes national security as a rationale for strict, uncompromising enforcement and (4) hypes the violence aspect of human smuggling and border crossing to support more aggressive interior enforcement. This policy mix, current practices suggest, encourages entho-racial profiling, hyper-surveillance, abusive stops, problematic searches and unwarranted detention of suspected unauthorised immigrants.
