can't see the images? view this message online.
Center for Policy Studies
Public Affairs Discussion Group |
| The Immigration Crackdown – Some Things To Know |
Bridget M. Haas, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Anthropology |
Friday April 24, 2026
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Meeting Both In-Person and by Zoom
Dampeer Room, Second Floor of Kelvin Smith Library
Case Western Reserve University
For those interested in participating by Zoom please e-mail padg@case.edu for more information.
Dear Colleagues:
Part of the problem with discussing public affairs these days is that it can get pretty depressing. Our topics tend to range from the horrible (fill in your preferred topic) to the simply extremely difficult (such as allocating organs for transplant) to situations that are pretty bad but, if looked at differently, might seem a little more promising than they typically seem (juvenile justice in Cuyahoga County).
It may be appropriate, therefore, that we are ending Spring Semester's programs with one of the scarier aspects of modern American politics and policy: the Trump administration's violent crackdown against illegal immigration. That has two aspects: policies at the border, and then the attempts to roundup and deport allegedly illegal aliens living in our communities.
The latter then has a series of dimensions. The most obvious are the legal questions - whether and how ICE and CBP are exceeding their authority, and how the courts are (mostly) enabling the Trump administration's approaches. A second dimension is the behavior of those agencies: why they are acting the way they are. A third is how the anti-immigrant domestic war is viewed by voters: i.e. whether the issue favors the Trump administration or whether the attack on immigrants has been so extreme - in part due to collateral damage to the economy and violence against non-immigrants - that some Trump voters are turning away from supporting him and his allies.
But some of the most important effects of the crackdown are harder to see: how it affects the lives of immigrants who may have lived in the United States for years and now virtually have targets on their backs. It includes how the immigration courts are working under the new pressures - which includes understanding how badly stressed they have always been, and what it is like for people going through the courts to live in seemingly endless legal limbo. And it involves how the asylum process has turned into a seeming trap - since applying for asylum, which was always stressful, has now become a way to attract the attention of bureaucracies looking to expel people, so filing for asylum may be a fast track to deportation.
Other dimensions include how entire communities in places like Springfield, Ohio, are coping with the government creating mass threat by eliminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) based on national origin - Haiti in Springfield, but Somalia or Syria or Venezuela or Yemen or many other countries for other communities. And also how non-immigrants, most visibly in the Twin Cities but in others as well have organized solidarity networks, to do things like hide immigrants, or to take care of children when their parents are captured - in some ways creating a new Underground Railroad.
These grassroots, local dimensions will be Professor Bridget Haas' topic this Friday. In Suspended Lives: Navigating Everyday Violence in the U.S. Asylum System (University of California Press, 2023) Professor Haas used research on midwestern cities to report on the experiences of Cameroonians and other Africans who entered the asylum process. In other work she has compared immigration courts in Cleveland and Denver, studied the situation in Springfield, Ohio after now-Vice-President Vance made that small city a focus for fear-mongering, and studied the development of networks to resist ICE and CBP in the Twin Cities. In all her work she uses an anthropologist's focus on how people experience challenges and respond to them, individually but especially as communities.
Join us as Professor Haas discusses what she considers the most important things we should know about the immigration crackdown as lived in our cities and towns.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Bridget M. Haas holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California-San Diego, with specific training in medical and psychological anthropology. Her research approaches immigration policies and institutions as key determinants of health and mental health. She is especially interested in how immigration policies in the United States contribute to the production of suffering and distress for migrants, in ways that are often routinized and rendered invisible.
Her book Suspended Lives: Navigating Everyday Violence in the US Asylum System, was published in 2023 by the University of California Press. This book draws on longitudinal ethnographic research among Cameroonian and other African asylum seekers in the midwestern United States, to explore the social, emotional, and embodied effects of being embedded in the complex, criminalizing, and protracted US asylum system. She is also the co-editor, with Amy Shuman, of Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum (Ohio University Press, 2019). Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed outlets such as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Ethos, Social Science and Medicine, Child Abuse and Neglect, among others.
At CWRU, Dr. Haas teaches introductory courses on medical and psychological anthropology, as well as courses on migration and health, anthropology of childhood and the family, and global mental health. | |
|