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The following is a chapter from Trumpism and its Discontents. Click to download a PDF of the book here.

By Joe C. Sati 

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Cover of the trumpism book
Illegality is not merely a political phenomenon. Illegality has personal effects that impinge on one’s agency and reasoning. The purpose of this chapter is to explore, through an analysis of Trumpism more generally, the link between illegality as a political phenomenon and illegality as a dimension of personhood. Given the relatively scant attention the issue of unauthorized immigration receives in theoretical treatments, it is not surprising that the literature does not account for the element of emergency that I argue is central to illegality. Section 1 is on emergency, section 2 is on hermeneutics, and section 3 is on reconceptualizing illegality through the previous two frames.  

This chapter begins with the premise that Trumpism is a state of affairs that have coalesced around a demagogic figure. Moving from that, the chapter examines the social dimension of noncitizenship. In particular, it focuses on “illegal alien” status, the dimensions of which are central components in understanding Trumpism as a general matter. This situation is even more true given that Trump began his campaign, and has maintained his presidency, through the fomenting of xenophobia and through operationalizing it in his administration’s approach to combating undocumented immigration. With these points in mind, I argue that understanding what an emergency is and how it is manipulated by those in power is critical in understanding both Trumpism and the notions of illegality that it relies on. 

This chapter proceeds in three sections. Using the work of Elaine Scarry, I argue in the first section that there is a political dimension to the declaration of an emergency. Furthermore, there is a political dimension to those whom we deem to be the threat. In the time of Trump, we need to think about who the threats are. In the sphere of immigration, the threat is the illegal alien, and there Trumpism inheres in making the “illegal” status of the twelve million undocumented people in the United States all but permanent. 

One of the consequences of Trumpism has been the amplification of migration discussions in such a way that undocumented immigrants have been deemed the threat in a particularly naked way. Such a framing of the threat has consequences, which I examine in the second section. I use the work of philosopher Miranda Fricker, particularly her work on hermeneutical injustice, to note that the purpose of illegality in the contemporary context is to create a hermeneutical shift. The rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and its pending rejection in the courts, makes the situation such that people who lack status are fundamentally considered illegal as a matter of law. The hermeneutical effects exist in Trump’s foreclosing of any potential for those who lack documentation not only to have legal status but also to become part of the polity more generally. 

In the third and final section, I take insights from the first two sections and apply them to the contemporary struggle around DACA. The pernicious consequences of illegality are more pronounced in light of the litigation. There has been a shift from merely marginalization to blatant, forthright injustices. Focusing on DACA makes the difference between the policies of Presidents Obama and Trump particularly clear. Whatever possible paths of redemption were available to DACA recipients have now been foreclosed through its rescission. This foreclosure further extends to all immigrants. Consequently, the rescission of DACA jeopardizes the ability of illegalized individuals to make claims in the public sphere without threat of violence or deportation. 

The aim of this chapter is to examine the relationship between claims of emergency and the ways in which they affect how the targets of these claims—in this case, undocumented immigrants—see themselves. More importantly, it is critical to examine what illegality means in the context of Trump. The purpose of this chapter is to make clear just how much illegality—or the manipulation of concepts of citizenship more generally—is a necessary component for understanding Trumpism more generally. Furthermore, for those who are interested in developing projects that resist Trumpism, it is important to understand the very phenomena that brought him to prominence. 

Emergency

Before I argue for illegality as a salient concept in the Trump era, I note that one can view illegality from two vantages—coercion and normativity—both of which clarify the distinct contribution that examining illegality brings to contemporary discourses on citizenship. The coercion subthesis posits that legal institutions both determine and enforce who is and who is not illegal; furthermore, legal institutions reserve the capacity to change the content and application of legality or illegality. Examining normativity allows us to account for the value that officials and most laypeople attach to legal conduct.

The coercion and normativity concerns are a part of contemporary discussions of immigration.1 More specifically, emergency can explain why the political Right’s response to the presence of twelve million unauthorized immigrants is to “enforce the laws already on the books.”2 This argument calls on American legal institutions to flex their coercive power to enforce the laws they view as already normatively ideal. In other words, current laws that mark its violators as “illegal” need not be changed; they just need to be enforced.  Claims of emergency, on this construction, are important because they frame the response to an imminent threat to the body politic. The imminence of the threat, moreover, makes extralegal actions justifiable. For Scarry, this conceptualization results in an inverted relationship to laws and legal actions—while the normativity of the anti-immigrant view calls for the enforcement of existing law, emergencies call for the suspension of or outright abrogation of existing law.

In explicating the social determinants and effects of emergency, I discuss the work of Elaine Scarry. Scarry rejects the assumption that deliberation harms our ability to respond to emergency. Scarry then argues that responding to emergencies need not be immediate, reflexive, or thoughtless. Though she uses four examples, I focus on one: Switzerland’s extensive network of nuclear fallout shelters (hereinafter “the Swiss System”). The insight theorists should draw from this example, I will argue, is this: the presence and content of rehearsing for emergencies indicate the normative value governments place both on themselves and on those they govern. Further, responses to emergencies need not (and should not) overlap with the actual timeline of emergencies. Put differently, planning responses to emergencies while in nonurgent contexts is a central duty of any legitimate governing body. To Scarry’s view I turn.

Scarry’s view is that conventional attitudes toward emergency engenders two seductions (her term): first, there is an opposition between thinking and acting, and second, there is an opposition between thinking and rapid action.3 In the context of democracy, deliberation, a value considered important to democratic governance, becomes the very thing that endangers it. The specter of emergency, on this view, provides justification for anti-deliberative (and anti-democratic) measures such as entering into armed conflict without the imprimatur of the legislature or to detain “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay for indefinite periods without charging them with crimes.4

Another dimension of appeals to emergency becomes clear: deliberation requires procedures, and procedures take time. Not only do procedures take time, but these processes also can possibly invite skepticism, which is said to hamper responses to emergencies.  Ordinary political division and discussion, otherwise taken to be characteristics of a healthy and active democracy, become yet another manner in which democracy may be threatened during a state of emergency. As such, the time required to enact procedures and sustain critical conversations concerning legislative choices is considered to be too hefty a risk to take. In other words, protecting the continued existence of a democracy requires suspending central components of the democratic process.

Thus, constant appeals to states of emergency end up dulling the populace’s capacity to recognize and respond to the manufactured ubiquity of such states of emergency. And, as Scarry explicates, such appeals have a directed political purpose. She writes that “a political leader who brings about chronic emergencies may have these same motives: to stun the mind, to immobilize, to bring about a genuine enslavement of attention. But he is unlikely to author a political treatise on this subject, for it would arm the reader with the very scepticism that enables resistance.”5 The question of political legitimacy is therefore one that must be considered at this juncture. If Scarry is right in thinking that constant appeals to emergencies have such deleterious effects on the populace and the state of democracies as a whole, then such appeals to emergencies undermine the political legitimacy of the governing body. Such emergencies, it seems, serve only to erode the foundations of democratic procedures. 

However, appeals to emergency do not necessarily introduce such pernicious effects. Rehearsing for emergencies can mitigate the dulling effects of constant appeals to states of emergency, if not eliminate them altogether. Scarry introduces the example of the Swiss Shelter system, emphasizing how a governing body may alter its relationship to an emergency. That is, a prepared reaction to an emergency can substantially minimize a country’s vulnerability to emergencies. In the Swiss Shelter system, there is a comprehensive set of procedures to be followed that protect both the Swiss people and their cultural artifacts. According to Scarry, each house is required by law to have a working fallout shelter, and male citizens from young adulthood to middle age (upper and lower bounds depend on exigencies) are tasked with particular responsibilities in the event of nuclear warfare. 

Of the many benefits of this model, the most important is that such a system allows Switzerland to retain its political autonomy.6 Swiss preparations for the possibility of nuclear warfare subsequently alter the very nature of Switzerland’s relationship to the emergency. Scarry contrasts the Swiss system with the American system, in which there is no analogous emergency preparedness framework. According to Scarry, the government leaders of the United States, the very individuals who had the nuclear arsenal at their disposal[,] continued to spend billions of dollars on an extensive shelter for themselves[,] . . . a man-made cavern large enough to contain three-story buildings and a lake—“a lake,” as one journalist observed, “large enough for water-skiing.”7

Though staggering in its own right, the fact that no similar set of protections exists for the general US populace should invite worry. Further yet, whereas the Swiss rehearsals for such emergencies involve the populace, no such analog exists in the American case. 

The purpose of presenting the Swiss shelter example and its juxtaposition to the American one is to illustrate that a government’s attitude toward its populace tracks eerily well with the scope of its emergency planning and with the level of contribution expected of the populace in rehearsing and—if an emergency requires it—carrying out such plans. It is important to note that the US government does think rehearsals for emergencies are useful. However, who it considers worth protecting is quite evident given that it has spent more money on a shelter for a select few than it has for all civil emergency defense measures allocated for the general population.8

The inclusion of Scarry’s material in this section should illuminate two things. The first is that an emergency can be, and usually is, a tool to dull the critical faculties of the citizenry—and this reaction is especially true when the response is made in the people’s name. Whip up enough fear about the prospect of an invasion of malcontents at the United States’ southern border, and the fact that a large chunk of wall funding is taking away money from funds earmarked for natural (read: actual) disasters becomes less open to critique. Second, the accessibility and comprehensiveness of emergency planning, including considerations of the scope of such planning, can mitigate political misuses of appeals to emergency. Thus, according to my construction, the existence of norms can serve a purpose in articulating the importance of rehearsing certain democratic functions, making it less likely that claims of emergency can abrogate or otherwise undermine political legitimacy in actual states of emergency.

Illegality, for Trumpism, as a Hermeneutical Injustice 

Having set up the argument of emergency thanks to Scarry’s work, I move to explore the effects illegality has on those to whom the label is attached. The purpose of this exploration is to argue that the notion of illegality captures the systemic denial of a legal forum for marginalized groups. Moreover, given legal recognition’s important role in constructing a person’s self-understanding, examining the importance of legal recognition behooves us to explore its hermeneutical dimensions. 

Hermeneutics, generally construed, deals with meaning and interpretation. Deriving from its normal use—that is, hermeneutics as textual interpretation— hermeneutics in this context captures how we, as social beings, interpret our lived experience as well as how we find the best methods by which we interpret that experience. In that sense, insofar as we human beings are engaging in a  hermeneutical project—that is, living in the world—we engage in a constant process of meaning-making, of creating and negotiating our notion of self.9 On the converse, to argue that some people are suffering hermeneutical injustice is to contend that people are unfairly inhibited in understanding themselves as human beings. And although an epistemic notion, hermeneutical injustice contains a constitutive moral premise: being able to make sense of one’s experience is an important part of what it means to be a human. Full legal recognition is not just a hermeneutical breakthrough; it is also a moment in which a significant epistemic injustice has been overcome.10

Miranda Fricker, in her book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, draws a distinction between hermeneutical marginalization and hermeneutical injustice.  Fricker defines hermeneutical marginalization as occurring “when there is unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to some significant area(s) of social experience.”11 She intends the notion to possess a moral-political component in that marginalized people are subordinated and excluded from a practice that would have value for those excluded.  Separate from the notion of hermeneutical marginalization is the notion of hermeneutical injustice, which she defines as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.”12 Though similar in content to hermeneutical marginalization, there are important differences between the two concepts. For one, the concept of hermeneutical marginalization speaks to the general state of inequity in hermeneutical participation among groups. That is, when some have outsized influence in developing meaning, and others are unjustly denied their ability to participate in social generations of meaning, the latter group is hermeneutically marginalized. 

Hermeneutical injustice, on the other hand, focuses on instances in which meaning- making for marginalized people is obscured. There is a vicious feedback loop: hermeneutical marginalization facilitates hermeneutical injustice, and hermeneutical injustice solidifies certain people’s positions as hermeneutically marginalized because their contributions are thus not seen as useful for public processes that generate meaning. The difference is much smaller than the distinction implies, but  to review, hermeneutical marginalization describes the deficit in hermeneutical resources owing to certain groups’ exclusion from social generations of meaning, whereas hermeneutical injustice describes how marginalization negatively affects how those oppressed perceive their experiences in a particular instance. 

Illegality folds into the previous analysis in the following way: Just as Fricker describes hermeneutical marginalization as the background conditions that make it difficult for marginalized people to make sense of their experiences, I situate illegality as the background legal conditions of hermeneutical marginalization in which hermeneutical injustice occurs in the instance. That is, illegality describes the background legal conditions that render certain people illegal and deny them legal recognition. The inability of marginalized people to make sense of their experiences as a function of legal hermeneutical injustice exposes marginalized people to further marginalization as well as to isolation from the social generation of meaning, of which law is an integral part. 

Illegality further relates to hermeneutical injustice in the following way: bearing illegal status means that the person so labeled is denied access to the process of legal generation of meaning since that process requires that all who take part see coparticipants as full, capable interlocutors. In other words, what the law finds salient and, by extension, what judges take to be useful tools for judicial decision-making systemically leave out the experiences of marginalized groups. The normativity subthesis then plays a role in that judges and the laity conflate existing law (which excludes marginalized people) with normatively desirable law. 

Conversely, systemic hermeneutical disadvantage for marginalized groups necessarily entails illicit hermeneutical advantage for more advantaged groups. As Fricker notes, certain kinds of material advantage generate epistemological advantage. She writes, “If [one has] material power, then [she] will tend to have an influence in those practices by which meanings are generated.”13 The myriad negative effects of illegality include an inability for marginalized people to fully make sense of their experiences owing to their exclusion from the spheres in which legal meaning is produced. The structural nature of hermeneutical marginalization conceptualizes the law as an engine of collective social meaning, and its continued rendering of certain bodies as illegal means that the law is geared to exclude certain persons and their experiences.14 Thus, I fold in Fricker’s concepts of hermeneutical marginalization and hermeneutical injustice because these terms capture an understudied component of lacking legal recognition: to lack legal recognition means to be unable to make sense of one’s experience in a way that affirms one’s status as an equal normative authority. 

In sum, illegality is an important lens through which to examine hermeneutical injustice because it acknowledges the importance of legal recognition and sheds particular light on instances in which such recognition is systemically absent. The structural, institutional focus of illegality places our analytical crosshairs square on legal institutions, its actors, and their promulgations, all of which have coercive power and all of which benefit from the normativity law enjoys among the laity. Illegality, thus, occurs when law is structured in such a way that a member of a marginalized group is, through denial of her status as a capable legal interlocutor, prevented from understanding an experience that is in her interests to be legally intelligible in such a way that it can be articulated as legal argument. Emergency, I further maintain, is the pretext by which those who lack documentation are continuously made illegal. Illegality thus puts into clear focus the legal institutional processes that render people illegal. “Making people illegal” represents illegality’s coercive subthesis in action, manifested in the violent denial of someone’s status as a speaker in the legal realm.

As it relates to Trumpism, this section shows the design of illegality, which makes valid making differential claims about the moral capacities of citizens in relation to noncitizens. Thus, folding in a Frickerian analysis firmly places illegality in the realm of the morally wrong. The racialized, nonwhite subject of the injustice is disrespected by not being seen and heard as a capable knower, a condition that Fricker argues is an essential component of human value. Therefore, full recognition as an epistemic agent is inextricably linked to full recognition as a legal person, a status that itself possesses a moral dimension The link between being made illegal and being considered not immoral but amoral— indicating not only a lack of concern about being moral but a lack of capability to be moral as well—structures the citizen’s vantage toward the illegalized. And since I contend that the law’s recognition of a person as an interlocutor possesses a moral component, the conflation of nonwhite status with the charge of amorality necessarily entails a denial of interlocutory status. 

In the next section, I make more explicit the links among illegality, emergency, and hermeneutical (in)justice. I use the struggle over the rescission of DACA as a case study to argue that Trumpism’s mission with DACA is to use the emergent threat of illegal immigration to position DACA recipients—and undocumented people more generally—as unable to take part in the meaning-making process that is American citizenship. 

Illegality and Emergency in America

Having used Scarry’s work to set out the notion of emergency in the first section and having developed an account of illegality through a hermeneutical lens in the second, I suggest that emergency necessitates a threat: the made-illegal alien, whom I argue is the target of exclusion in environments of political emergency. My strategy at this juncture of my argument is to use current events as an illustrative tool. More specifically, I examine the ways in which policies such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) enable those eligible to surmount the hermeneutical challenges illegality brings forth. Once we understand the relationship between DACA and hermeneutical injustice, we can better understand what is at stake in the legal and political battles surrounding its rescission. 

To understand Trumpism’s relationship to DACA, it is important to examine the milieu that brought Trump to power in the first place. When then-candidate Donald Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by attacking Mexican immigrants, whom he deemed to be “rapists,” he was not focusing on the immigrants who are already in the United Sates so much as he was focusing on those outside the country. Illegality is thus attached to the prospective migrant before the act of migration if the possibility of being illegal can be transmuted to a certain body. 

Using the American context as an example, consider comments President Trump made to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 6, 2019. Trump additionally mocked asylum seekers, calling the asylum process a “scam.” Further yet, he said that most asylum seekers more closely resembled UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) contenders than people who can legitimately seek asylum.15 His rhetoric has transformed the situation from the practical impossibility of finding duplicitous criminals and separating them from legitimate asylum seekers into the unilateral declaration that the whole asylum system tout court is a scam. This equivalency, of course, is not to mention that it represents the height of irony that Trump’s declaration that the asylum system is open to corruption was made to a group of people who had been refugees in the past.

Ignoring ironies such as those noted above is a mark of contemporary politics, encapsulated in the manufacturing of crises to make palatable policies that detain and deport “illegal aliens.” Further, this process does not just happen in relation to political rhetoric but also as official legal promulgation. On January 25, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order expanding the federal government’s immigration enforcement powers against “aliens who illegally enter the United States and those who overstay or otherwise violate the terms of their visas [and] present a significant threat to national security and public safety.”16 Though the executive order states that it places a heightened focus on “aliens who engage in criminal conduct in the United States,” it was not too long until this pretense toward priority was dispensed with. The executive order defines as deportable those who have been convicted of any criminal offense; have been charged with any criminal offense, where such charge has not been resolved; have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense; have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a governmental agency; have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits; are subject to a final order of removal, but who have not complied with their legal obligation to depart the United States; or in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security [italics added].17

Though the executive order spends time gesturing at a definition of criminal immigrants as a select few with high deportability, the final clause of this excerpt, for all intents and purposes, invalidates all that precedes it by giving complete deference to the immigration officer. If a person of interest does not fit into the stated categories of having a chargeable criminal offense or being a ward of the state, for example, the immigration officer is allowed—even implored—to use his judgment as a backstop from which to characterize the illegal alien as a threat to public security. When all else fails, the immigration officer becomes an enforcer, a soldier in the manufactured war against illegalized immigrants.  

Nevertheless, illegality, as I have set out so far, does not exhaust the problems that impinge on the efficacy of full legal recognition. It might be that, in combating illegality and expanding the realm of legally significant experiences through the legal inclusion of marginalized groups, the law surreptitiously restricts the autonomy that members of marginalized groups have as equals in society.18 To explain the problem motivating this qualification, I present the examples of undocumented “Dreamers” endorsing candidates for president and of the narratives surrounding the September 2017 rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy. The example of undocumented or “illegalized” immigrants gives us a glimpse into the challenges marginalized groups have in making their experiences legally intelligible, thus presenting a very useful object of analysis. 

On September 5, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy would be discontinued in a process the Department of Homeland Security termed an “orderly wind down.” Prior to the official announcement, many prominent (liberal) figures demonstrated their support for DACA recipients through the #DefendDACA campaign. Many of these defenses of the executive order painted DACA recipients as children who had entered the country through no fault of their own. A Miami Herald editorial arguing in favor of retaining DACA featured Larissa Yanin Martinez, the valedictorian of her high school graduating class.19 Leon Panetta praised DACA recipients as patriotic and amenable to military service.20 He argued that one reason why DACA recipients should remain protected is that “they provide an outstanding pool of young women and men who can engage in . . . military service.”21

DACA recipients represent a contentious point of distinction. By this, I mean that they are recognized, but in some bastardized way. Lack of recognition insofar as that means complete ignorance or suppression of a group may not apply here; what is occurring is misrecognition. When arguments to maintain DACA are premised on grounds that its recipients make great cannon fodder or are otherwise valued only for their contributory potential, it becomes less likely for illegalized immigrants to be recognized as people and thus shed their illegalized status. Far from a struggle to obtain papers alone, the immigrant rights struggle brings to the fore an important point: being misrecognized is as much a part of being denied due recognition as normative equals as being outright ignored.

In conclusion, developing an account of Trumpism to accurately focus on illegality’s systemic origins is important because, according to Harald Bauder, “[terminology] can imply causality, generate emotional responses, and transmit symbolic meanings.”22 Thus, illegality as systemic epistemic injustice indicates a dynamic process that is faithful to the illegalized person’s experience. Illegality as the denial of legal recognition is the product of a historical, social, and epistemic process that is dynamic. Historically, illegality speaks to the many ways in which whiteness has violently regarded some people as not being human and has determined—usually by force—what the standards of humanness are. 

Socially, illegality indicates how noncitizens have been and continue to be not only robbed of the ability to make sense of their social experiences but also excluded from the public, social process by which legal, moral, and cultural meaning is produced. Epistemically, illegalized persons are not seen as people capable of knowledge; such epistemic injustice constitutes a moral wrong in that it has been deemed permissible to disregard this capacity, one that is essential to how all persons view themselves. Lack of legal recognition brings to the fore the fact that legal disadvantage is constitutive of epistemic disadvantage, and epistemic injustice is indicative of social disadvantage.

This situation solidifies my contention that it is not the act that is illegal but rather the person who is illegalized, regardless of whether a particular person actually moves across borders. Even though rendering people illegal has a global reach, the fracture that prevents a transnational analysis of illegality focuses on the outcome of particularized processes and thereby conceals the process itself. Terms like illegal, undocumented, nonstatus, or alien are byproducts of localized, US–centric immigration discourse and are provincial in their analysis, not to mention myopic in their political objectives. Therefore, epistemic injustice through illegality facilitates discussions on the global nature of the contemporary crisis of noncitizenship through delocalizing discourse and offering expansive critique of its policy aims.

  • 1Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, “Alien Language: Immigration Metaphors and the Jurisprudence of Otherness,” Fordham Law Review 79 (April 5, 2011): at 1550.
  • 2Steven Camarota, “Enforce Immigration Laws Already on the Books,” NPR, March 30, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5311282.
  • 3Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 15.
  • 4Ibid., 5. As Scarry writes, “In the United States, the dissolution of law in the second half of the twentieth century accelerated in the twenty-first. In the first eight years of the new century, the claim of emergency and the momentum toward unconstrained executive power became increasingly legible, with a presidential office that sanctioned the practice of torture, detention without charge, widespread surveillance of its citizens[,] and a private mercenary army answerable only to the President.”
  • 5Ibid., 14.
  • 6Ibid., 57. Given that Switzerland does not have the leverage necessary to compel nuclear states such as the United States and Russia to stop referencing the use of nuclear missiles that may cross over Swiss airspace, the country’s ability to protect all of its people obviates the ill effects of this lack of leverage and, more importantly, protects them from associated blackmail.
  • 7Ibid., 57–58.
  • 8Ibid., 60.
  • 9By “negotiating,” I focus on the distinct process by which a person reacts to her surroundings, including, but not limited to, other selves.
  • 10Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 149.
  • 11Ibid., 153–55.
  • 12Ibid., 155.
  • 13Ibid., 145.
  • 14Ibid., 153.
  • 15CSPAN., 2019. Trump: ‘The asylum program is a scam’. [online] Mc- Clatchy’s DC. Availlable at: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article228937904.html [Accessed 11 May 2019].
  • 16“Executive Order: Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” WhiteHouse.gov, Jan. 25, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-border-….
  • 17Ibid., emphasis mine.
  • 18I am thankful to Sarah Song for helping me develop this point.
  • 19“How DACA Pits Good Immigrants against Millions of Others,” Washington Post, Sept. 7, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/07/how-da….
  • 20Ibid.
  • 21Panetta, L., 2017. Leon Panetta Op-Ed: What About The ‘Dreamers’ Who Serve Us? [online] chicagotribune.com. Available at: <https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-trump-dreamers-dac…; [Accessed 11 May 2019].
  • 22Harald Bauder, “Why We Should Use the Term ‘Illegalized’ Refugee or Immigrant: A Commentary,” International Journal of Refugee Law 26, no. 3 (2014): 328, doi:10.1093/ijrl/eeu032.