Cruel and Usual: Recursive Racial Cruelty at the US Immigration Courts

In this paper, I advance a theorization of recursive racial cruelty by focusing on the suffering of racialized respondents in the US immigration courts and connecting it to the routine functioning of the US empire and colonial racial capitalism. Immigration courts operate within the US Department of Justice (DOJ), where immigration judges hear the government's removal (deportation) cases against non-citizen residents and adjudicate their right to stay in the US. As the legal avenue for settling questions of deportation and asylum, these courts are often posed as humane and just alternatives to the spectacular public displays of cruelty involving militarized raids, abductions, and expedited deportations (sometimes to third-country prisons) that have characterized Trump's two terms in office. Using ethnographic data from 42 cases in Boston from 2020-2022, which took place during both Trump and Biden's presidential terms, I argue that the immigration courts are in fact a parallel public-facing vehicle and staging ground for racial cruelty for the US empire-state. In the immigration courts, a combination of de jure and de facto practices work daily to reinforce a racialized politics of imperial membership. In the process, it also circulates money out of the hands of racialized respondents and their families, so that eventually profit can be made. Furthermore, the racial cruelty exercised in the immigration courts, is recursive in two ways. For each immigrant respondent, such cruelty recurs and builds in every stage of the court proceedings, from the initial hearing to the adjudication of bond to the final deportation order, and through their everyday experience in proximate institutions such as detention centers. As a result of the ongoing effects of US (and more broadly, Euro-American) imperialism in much of the world, racial cruelty also recurs generationally and sometimes transnationally during immigrant respondents' lifetimes. By advancing a theory of recursive racial cruelty, this article contributes to decolonial theory building and bridges sociological literature on US immigration, race, organizations, empire, and political economy.