Welcome to the nomosphere*

Let’s begin with a situation. A disturbing situation. The men with guns entered Rosa Sorto’s home by breaking a window and unlocking the side door (Arias v. ICE brief [07-01959]). It was 6:30 in the morning. They went from room to room demanding that sleepers arise, assemble in the living room and submit to questioning. Some of the men who lived in the house were taken away in handcuffs, dressed only in their boxer shorts. Some people were allowed to stay after the men with guns left. The invasions were repeated for four days all over town. Throughout 2007 and 2008 they were repeated in dozens of small towns and urban neighborhoods throughout the country (Chiu et al., 2009). Hundreds of men, women, and children were rounded up, put on waiting busses, sent to local jails, army bases, and detention facilities a thousand miles away. Some were flown out of the country. Children were stranded in day-care centers and schools with no word as to where their parents had been taken. One girl said, “All of us are scared. When you go to school you don’t know if your parents will be there when you get home. I don’t feel safe anywhere-walking to the school bus, walking outside the school building” (Freedman, 2007). In one town 400 people took refuge in the basement of a Catholic church. The men with guns were participating in world-making projects called

Operation Cross Check and Operation Return to Sender. Among the towns where these militarized maneuvers took place were Wilmer, MN, New Bedford, MA, Pinsville, OH, and Greely, CO. Small towns such as Cactus, TX were virtually emptied of residents after, in the words of The New York Times, “… hundreds of agents clad in riot gear and armed with assault

weapons” raided a work-site (Moreno, 2007). The men with guns were members of a Fugitive Apprehension Team working for ICE (the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement), an agency of the US federal government’s Department of Homeland Security. Those who were on the receiving end of these “operations” were slaughter-house workers, garment stitchers, gardeners and day-laborers. They were also mothers, sons, sisters. Some were petty criminals, some were mentally retarded. Some were labor organizers. Some were citizens of the United States; others were citizens of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. Practically, perhaps they were citizens of nowhere, denizens of the global assembly line. Some American citizens have had their homes invaded multiple times because of “mistaken identity” (Bernstein, 2007a, 2007b). Primarily these people are suspects. They are suspected of being in the wrong place, on the wrong side of the line. They are suspected of being persons whose very physical existence is construed as “illegal presence.” The timing of Operation Cross Check coincided with US Congressional

debates about “comprehensive immigration reform” that includes the reestablishment of a guest-worker program (under which “aliens” may be authorized to work in the US but with the possibility of becoming voting citizens permanently foreclosed), and the construction of a 370-mile long, 18-foot high wall along the northern border of Mexico (Hulse and Swarns, 2006). Operation Cross Check may have been no more than a demonstration project intended to “send a message” that the Bush Administration was taking “the illegal alien crisis” seriously (Emanatian and Delaney, 2009). But this “message” was sent through the enactment of events such as those just sketched. The men with guns were enforcing the rules that constitute immigration law. The rules exist and they were broken. Against complaints to the contrary, their superiors assert that the ICE raids, as they are called, are conducted in compliance with the law. Anticipating challenges by migrantrights and civil-rights activists, one spokesperson, Tim Counts, has stated, “We’ll make our case in a court of law” (Freeman, 2007). Advocates for the prey argue that the raids are conducted with defective warrants or no warrants at all, in violation of the Fourth Amendment (Chiu, 2009; Arias v. ICE 07-01959). Whether or not Guatemalans, Salvadorans, or Mexicans had crossed into the space of sovereignty without authorization, advocates allege that the agents had crossed into the space of privacy illegally. And this, they assert, makes all the difference. The situations that unfolded in Rosa Sorto’s living room in Wilmer,

MN, the Swift Company meat-packing plant in Cactus, TX, the Bianco Inc. shop-floor in New Bedford and hundreds of other sites during the time that Operation Cross Check, Operation Wagon Train, and Operation Return to Sender were sweeping through the American landscape, can be described, analyzed, and assessed from a number of perspectives. For example, one could emphasize the causal relationship between these events

and the global or hemispheric political-economic transformations that exacerbated conditions of immiseration in the villages and cities of Latin America (Lopez, 2007; Stephen, 2007). From this vantage point one might explain why millions of people are sufficiently desperate to feel compelled to walk for weeks in order to reach Los Estados Unidos, where they might (or might not) get a chance to earn 10 dollars an hour cutting up cow carcasses on a fast-moving assembly line. One might better grasp the importance of remittances from the US for mitigating the effects of immiseration. Alternatively, one could emphasize the experiential realities related to

raising the money to make the trip, transacting with coyotes who may as well leave them to die in the desert as not, living clandestinely after they arrive. One could, for example, focus on the everyday lives of people such as Fausto Lopez and other Mixtec, Triqui, and Zapotec people who live in makeshift encampments along California’s Russian River. David Bacon’s book, Communities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration (2006), documents the daily lives of these migrant workers-how they work, shop, eat, raise their children. For many, for example, members of el Frente Indigena de Organazaciones Binacionales, (a movement of “indigenous-aliens”), an immediate aspiration is to learn enough Spanish to communicate with other agricultural workers in California. One might also try to understand these situations as they were experienced

by those gathered up in the ICE raids. A woman who was swept up in the New Bedford raid describes some of her experiences like this:

It was a Tuesday, we were all working and all of a sudden a whole rush of people entered. I heard someone scream. When I moved back to see I saw a whole bunch of people entering. They were grabbing people … They would grab [the men] and throw them to the floor, even hitting their faces. When I saw this I ran to the first exit I found. When I was going there I saw even more coming in … The word I kept hearing them use was Fuck You. They took me out of there around five. In a place they were taking

information. That took a long time, and the women that had small babies, some of them were let go. But they didn’t listen to the majority. Because I told them about my daughter and I told them that I didn’t have anyone to leave my daughter with … Then when we were there, I don’t know the name, where they detained us the first time … There were several other rooms. I saw that all of the other women … were being taken to talk with the lawyers. So I asked them, “why don’t you take me?” They told me, “if you are not on the list, you won’t be called” … It wasn’t until they moved me to El Paso, Texas … then the lawyers came and they let me talk with them.