New book captures hidden toll of immigration enforcement on families

(Press-News.org) “They took Dad.”

That sentence opens Carolina Valdivia’s new book, Sanctuary Making: Immigrant Families Reshaping Geographies of Deportability, published this month by the University of California Press.

The book chronicles what happens to families in the aftermath of those three words, and the extraordinary lengths that ordinary people go to in order to protect the ones they love.

“This is a book with a sense of urgency” wrote Emmy Award–winning journalist and former Univision News anchor Jorge Ramos in his review. “From the first line — ‘They took Dad’ — you know that something is changing in the United States and that immigrants are being targeted... It’s impossible not to be touched by the human tragedy we are living. This is an essential book to understand the new United States.”

For decades, immigration enforcement in the United States was largely imagined as something that happened at the border, a distant, physical line separating the country from those trying to enter it. Valdivia’s research dismantles that comfortable narrative.

Her book meticulously documents how immigration enforcement has migrated deep into the interior of American life, transforming once-mundane spaces — neighborhoods, roads, worksites, hospitals, grocery stores and private homes — into what she calls “hot spots,” sites of surveillance, fear and danger for undocumented and mixed-status families. The result is what Valdivia terms a “geography of deportability,” a psychological and physical landscape in which no space feels fully safe.

“Even settings previously associated with safety, like one's home, become hot spots infused with fear and trepidation,” explained Valdivia, assistant professor of criminology, law and society.

The statistics behind this shift are staggering. Drawing on interviews with more than 100 members of immigrant families, Valdivia has constructed a detailed portrait of what interior enforcement looks like on the ground, and what it costs the people living under it.

Of all the stories Valdivia encountered over years of research, one stands out as the moment the book’s central themes came into sharpest focus.

Maribel was 21 years old, a DACA recipient, when immigration officers came for her family. Her neighbors had reported her family to authorities following a dispute — a detail that speaks to the way enforcement has become, in some communities, a tool of interpersonal conflict, Valdivia noted.

“The officers arrived at her home in unmarked vehicles, confronted her mother, and issued a chilling warning: We'll be back,” she said. “This story crystallized several of the central themes in Sanctuary Making, including the process through which immigration officers transform settings into hot spots and the covert tactics that are employed in the process.”

What followed illustrated another of the book’s defining arguments: the pivotal, often invisible role that young adults play in their families’ survival. In the weeks after the encounter, Maribel became her mother’s de facto safety coordinator, arranging rides so her mother could travel between home, work and a safe location, all while managing her own life and fears.

When Valdivia interviewed Maribel, the weight of that fear was palpable. Every time a black SUV pulled into the parking lot, Maribel paused. She couldn't help it.

“To me, this reflected some of the dynamics that give rise to the geographies of deportability,” Valdivia said, “where even settings previously associated with safety become infused with fear.”

Perhaps the most striking, and most underreported, finding in Sanctuary Making is the degree to which young adults have become the invisible backbone of their families’ coping strategies.

Valdivia describes the “emotional and material labor” these young people perform: navigating legal processes, brokering communication with attorneys, providing financial support and serving as the primary emotional pillars for parents and younger siblings living in fear. In many cases, she found, young adults made major life decisions, such as where to attend college or whether to attend college at all, around their families’ vulnerability.

“Many young adults opted to remain close to home so that they could be near their parents in the event of an emergency,” Valdivia noted. Several of those she interviewed who had been pursuing higher education made the painful choice to step away from their studies entirely when a parent was deported and younger siblings needed care.

“These growing responsibilities compelled some young adults to grapple with a difficult question: remain enrolled in college and continue pursuing their dreams or to step out of college to focus on their new roles at home?” she said. “There were several young adults who were compelled to do the latter.”

The mental health toll is equally significant, Valdivia found.

Despite the crushing stress many young people carry, she said, they are often coping in isolation — too afraid to disclose their family’s immigration status to teachers, counselors or even close friends.

“This fear is particularly heightened in today’s political climate,” she added.

Sanctuary Making is not only a work of documentation, but a call to action, and Valdivia is direct about who needs to act.

Educators and school counselors, she argues, have a particularly powerful role to play.

Hosting “Know Your Rights” workshops, connecting students with trusted networks, fostering belonging in classrooms, and simply telling a student, “you are safe here,” can be a form of what the book calls “sanctuary making,” the active, collective effort to shield families from the worst outcomes of enforcement.

“At the core of these efforts is the need to communicate to young adults that they — as an educator or counselor — are trustworthy,” Valdivia said. “Sanctuary making often begins with letting students know they are safe.”

The book’s broader theoretical framework — encompassing “enforcement in the shadows,” “geographies of deportability,” and “sanctuary making” at the family and community levels — is offered as a toolkit for researchers seeking to understand the rapidly evolving landscape of U.S. immigration enforcement.

“My hope is that these concepts can be used by scholars to capture ongoing changes in U.S. immigration policy and enforcement practices,” Valdivia said, “including tracing the expanding geographies of deportability in other cities and states.”

After years of immersion in some of the most painful stories of contemporary American life, Valdivia speaks with purpose and, carefully, with hope.

That hope is rooted in what she calls “sanctuary making at the community level,” the rapid response networks being launched by immigrant rights organizers, the neighbors and strangers becoming legal observers for the first time, the volunteers, donors and ordinary people distributing information about enforcement actions in real time.

“Community members are becoming motivated — many for the first time — to join in these efforts,” she said. “This work requires significant time and effort, but it takes a community to foster a sense of solidarity, safety, and belonging.”

Scholars who have read the book have been struck by its rigor and its humanity.

“This sort of intimate exploration of the daily navigation of illegality and deportability is rare and critically important,” wrote Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Education. “It takes a very particular kind of scholar to do this work and to do it well; Carolina Valdivia is that scholar.”
— Mimi Ko Cruz

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