The New Disappeared: Illegality, the Deportation Regime, and the Resurrection of State Violence

President Donald J. Trump’s executive actions expanding immigration enforcement and reproducing stigmatizing discourses about immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers are not a new direction in immigration enforcement. While the racist dimensions of the approach are more unmasked in his rhetoric, current enforcement is merely the expansion of an entrenched project of state violence. The current panic, in other words, is the culmination of the buildup of the deportation regime (De Genova and Peutz 2010), an interconnected web of systems of incarceration and exile that serves as a broad mechanism of social control and repression. In the U.S., this system has been built over the past several decades and expanded during the past four presidential administrations, including President Barack Obama’s tenure. This regime “disappears” migrant bodies and enacts state violence on them in a way that resonates with past state repression and terror regimes facilitated by U.S. military aid to Latin America throughout the American Century. Detainees today occupy the position of los nuevos desaparecidos, the new disappeared. In this paper, I provide a theoretical framing for the contemporary regime of detention and deportation that links the system to historic practices of state violence and delineates three ways in which the state can be said to engage in disappearing. Expanding the concept from its typical usage referencing kidnapped and tortured victims of state repression in Latin American civil struggle, I bring the idea of los desaparecidos to bear on the regime of exploitation, detention, and deportation causing suffering and precarity among Latin American migrants in the United States in the contemporary moment. By incorporating the concept of disappearance, I emphasize the continuities between forms of imperialist and neocolonial violence and contemporary intersectional oppressions that reproduce the continued marginalization of people of color both in the United States and globally