"The Sense of Law is Lost": Car Impoundments and the Racial Naturalization of Mexican Immigrants

The car impoundment is an informal technology of immigration enforcement that impoverishes undocumented, unlicensed drivers and constitutes an instance of what Devon Carbado terms “racial naturalization.” While... [ view full abstract ]

The car impoundment is an informal technology of immigration enforcement that impoverishes undocumented, unlicensed drivers and constitutes an instance of what Devon Carbado terms “racial naturalization.” While immigration scholars have extensively analyzed devolution or the process of farming out federal immigration enforcement responsibilities to local police, car impoundments have received comparatively little attention. This local police practice, while nominally about traffic safety, constitutes a ritual of humiliation that impedes the economic and physical mobility of undocumented Mexican immigrants and naturalizes them not to US citizenship but to US racial hierarchy.

Such an expansive view of the role of police in the racialization of Mexican immigrants takes us beyond a narrow consideration of devolution or deportation per se. I focus in particular on the car impoundment as an informal mechanism of immigrant enforcement. While deportation is the most consequential tool states use to enforce immigration law, deportations represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many forms of risk that immigrants confront daily. The car impoundment deserves closer inspection because it is an understudied feature of the immigration enforcement regime, it creates a serious financial burden for immigrant families, and because it constitutes a ritual of humiliation and subordination, of racial naturalization.

Drawing on three years of participant observation and 61 interviews with Mexican immigrants in two California cities, this paper also examines immigrants’ assessments of police in general. These range from the strongly positive to the strongly negative, revealing important variation in immigrants’ experience of police. Interestingly, even when immigrants’ assessments of police were strongly negative, they still report an ambivalence about whether police can be trusted.

While negative regard of police by working class people of color is certainly not a new phenomenon, I argue that this ambivalence can be read in two ways, both of which, I argue, are simultaneously plausible. On the one hand, mistrust signals the deteriorating relationship between racialized, working class immigrant communities and police: a pattern that resonates with historical and contemporary relations between African Americans and police. On the other hand, this ambivalence suggests immigrants still basically rely on police as a bulwark against the chaos they fear might reign in their absence. Their abiding faith in police as an institution chafes against their first and second hand experiences with actual police in their daily lives. While relations between Mexican immigrants and police are imperiled by the “institutionalized practice” (Epp et al. 2015) of the car impoundment and the broader crimmigration trend, this ambivalence may also be understood as a generative opening—an invitation—to develop effective community-police relations premised on interventions on serious social harms, not immigration violations.