This talk will focus on the impact of ICE surveillance – electronic monitor (EM) – on immigrants, and their communities. She shares insights on how EM operates as a surveillance tool that influences the immigrant’s relationship with the state, community, and self. Release from detention could conceivably provide an immigrant with the benefits of reintegration into a co-ethnic community. However, under surveillance, the immigrant loses access to co-ethnic social capital, as the state fractures their safety net. Thus, EM operates as a tool of legal violence, creating a new axis of stratification and producing the unequal distribution of autonomy and resources. EM generates a condition of ‘extended punishment’ that consists of material and social harms that affect immigrants, families, and communities.
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Mirian Martinez-Aranda is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of California Davis and a visiting scholar at the Global Migration Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA. Her research examines the social, material, and health consequences of immigration detention on immigrants, families, and communities. She is also a former National Science Foundation and Marvin Hoffenberg fellow with the Center for American Politics and Public Policy, and a Ronald E. McNair Scholar. Her work has been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Law and Society Review. Dr. Martinez-Aranda is currently working on her book which examines the experiences of immigrants after they are released from detention, to show how immigration enforcement policies constrains and shapes the lives of formerly detained immigrants as they experience family reunification, community incorporation, life under ICE surveillance, and engagement with the immigration legal system.