How Immigration Enforcement Moved From the Border Into the Interior of American Life

Three words. "They took Dad."

That sentence opens Carolina Valdivia's new book, Sanctuary Making: Immigrant Families Reshaping Geographies of Deportability, published by the University of California Press. It is the kind of opening that accomplishes in eight syllables what a social science monograph might otherwise require pages to establish: enforcement is not abstract. It happens to specific people. And the moment of it ripples outward through a family in ways that no database of deportation statistics captures.

The book documents what happens after those three words - and what ordinary people do to prevent the conditions that make them necessary.

Enforcement as geography

For most of American history, immigration enforcement was imagined spatially as something that happened at the border. The line between countries was the place where the state checked papers and turned people back. Life in the interior of the country - in cities and towns far from any international boundary - was understood as a different kind of space, where enforcement was largely absent and where millions of undocumented immigrants built lives, raised children, and became woven into the fabric of communities.

Valdivia's research documents the systematic dismantling of that distinction. Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, she traces how enforcement has moved inward - into neighborhoods, onto roads, into workplaces, into hospitals, into grocery stores, and into private homes. Spaces that were once understood as de facto safe have become what she calls "hot spots": locations where the risk of immigration enforcement contact is real and present.

The transformation is not evenly distributed. Some neighborhoods, some employers, some institutions trigger far higher rates of enforcement contact than others. This unevenness shapes how people navigate their daily lives - which routes they drive, which doctors they see, which grocery stores they use, which social events they attend.

What families actually do

The book's core contribution is not the documentation of enforcement's reach - that has been covered in journalism and policy research - but the careful ethnographic account of how affected families respond. Valdivia describes the creation of what she calls sanctuary making: the informal, collective, and often invisible work of building protective geographies in response to the threat of enforcement.

This takes many forms. Families map safe routes and safe spaces. Communities develop rapid alert systems. Employers, teachers, and neighbors become nodes in informal protective networks. Churches and community organizations adapt their spaces. Children learn protocols for what to do if a parent does not come home. None of this appears in official policy documents. It is the architecture of survival built by people who cannot rely on formal institutional protection.

Valdivia's framing treats this sanctuary making not as passive coping but as active reshaping of the social and physical geography of daily life - a form of agency under severe constraint. The book chronicles specific families and communities across the U.S. interior, building a detailed account of how the threat of deportation restructures domestic life, parenting decisions, economic choices, and community bonds.

Children at the center

A recurring theme is what enforcement does to children - both those who are themselves undocumented and those who are U.S. citizens living in mixed-status families. The fear of losing a parent to deportation is a specific form of childhood stress with documented effects on development, school performance, and long-term health. The sanctuary-making practices that families develop are partly structured around protecting children from the worst outcomes: ensuring that a child left alone when a parent is taken knows where to go and who to call, making arrangements for child custody across immigration status lines, managing conversations about risk in ways that inform without traumatizing.

Emmy Award-winning journalist Jorge Ramos, reviewing the book, described it as essential to understanding the new United States - arguing that the human dimension of what the research documents is impossible to remain unmoved by.

Research context and limits

The book is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in specific communities during a particular period. Enforcement practices and their geographic reach have varied significantly across presidential administrations, and the conditions Valdivia documented reflect a specific policy environment. The current enforcement context, as of early 2026, has intensified considerably from the period covered by her earlier research, making the questions she raises more urgent rather than less.

Ethnographic research captures depth rather than breadth - it provides detailed accounts of specific communities rather than statistically representative samples of all affected families. The patterns Valdivia identifies are illustrative rather than quantified, and communities with different characteristics may exhibit different responses to enforcement pressure.

What the book offers is a sustained, close-range account of how policy translates into lived experience - a translation that aggregate statistics cannot perform. The bureaucratic language of enforcement - detainments, removals, compliance operations - describes the same events as three words: "They took Dad." Valdivia's work insists on holding both registers simultaneously, and on documenting what families build in the space between them.