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Abstract

As promised during his campaign, President Trump made immigration central to his administration’s goals, aiming to restrict the influx of those who immigrate to the United States through either legal or extralegal means. Almost immediately after taking office in January 2017, President Trump issued an executive order instructing the Department of Justice to prioritize the criminal prosecution of immigration offenses. The current attack on immigrants took further shape in September 2017, when President Trump chose to rescind protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) afforded to the estimated 800,000 people brought to the US as minors. Despite widespread and bipartisan support for the Dreamers, as DACA recipients are often called, President Trump directed the agencies under his purview to phase out the program that enabled DACA recipients to avoid deportation and to work legally in the country. Ending DACA put hundreds of thousands of child immigrants at risk, deliberately under-mining these young Americans’ chance of success and preventing their inclusion as members of society. The changes to DACA were a clear attack on the social incorporation of a vulnerable segment of the population, paving the way for the immigration crisis the following summer. These attacks deliberately racialize and exclude Latinx people, demanding a collective and concerted response. The immi-gration crisis requires us to imagine how Latinx communities can engage, resist, and reshape the spaces that structure our lives.

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