Boston Review: The Making of the Deportation Machine

The Making of the Deportation Machine

The pillars aren’t new. They were built over decades, with bipartisan consensus.

• Marie Gottschalk

In the recent film One Battle After Another, the line between immigration enforcement and law enforcement has vanished in the United States. The constitutional and human rights of citizens and noncitizens alike are evaporating as brutal immigration crackdowns fuel political repression and ignite blasts of violence. The odious Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw—chillingly played by Sean Penn, with an uncanny resemblance to recently reassigned U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino—slithers between immigration authorities, local police, the armed forces, and white supremacist militias. He is finally punished not by state authorities acting under the force of law but rather by his white supremacist frenemies, who execute him because he has become a political liability.

Immigration enforcement has long been braided together with the criminal legal system, fueling the carceral state.

Whatever one makes of the politics of the film, it is hard not to be struck by its resonances with the present. Donald Trump’s militant mass deportation operation can only be described in terms the administration reserves for protesters: it is a campaign of terror, backed by the full force and effect of the federal government. In jurisdictions across the country, masked immigration authorities, troops, local police, and sheriffs’ departments are working in lockstep to carry out this mission. The lives claimed include not only Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis but also a Cuban man, Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention at Camp East Montana in Texas was ruled a homicide in January, as well as at least thirty-two others who have died in conditions deplored by human rights groups as inhumane, illegal, and barbaric. All the while, some state and local authorities and especially the public are pushing back against the feds or preparing to resist the onslaught when their time comes.

How did we get here? Blaming Trump or Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff for homeland security, only gets us so far. For anyone seeking to stem state violence and mitigate the brutalities and injustices of the existing order, understanding how the criminal legal system and immigration enforcement have been braided together is essential. So is understanding the central but often overlooked role of sheriffs’ departments and the political economy of rural areas as bulwarks of the carceral and deportation state. Several recent books paint a stark portrait of the uniquely expansive regime of U.S. policing and punishment, revealing what conventional wisdom gets wrong about its origins and scale and clarifying the obstacles to changing it.

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There is perhaps no better place to start in tracing the roots of this moment than The Migrant’s Jail, historian Brianna Nofil’s magisterial study of the mutual development of U.S. penal and immigration policy over more than a century. The political and institutional pillars of the system as we know it today were not put in place relatively recently, Nofil shows. On the contrary, they emerged over decades through bipartisan consensus and complex interactions between federal, state, and local authorities.

The story begins in the late 1800s, by which time U.S. courts had reached a consensus that local governments were not free to forge or execute their own immigration policies. Whether and how the federal government might coerce or cajole localities to carry out federal immigration policies remained unsettled, however. The pitched battles today between the Trump administration and certain states and municipalities over sanctuary status, detention facilities, and cooperation with ICE are being fought on this still indeterminate terrain. But such antagonism is more the historical exception than the rule, Nofil demonstrates. Over the long run, the dominant pattern has been mutually beneficial cooperation between the federal government, states, counties, and cities.

Indeed, county jails have always been “foundational to the project of federal immigration law enforcement,” Nofil explains, yet “they have operated with a staggering absence of oversight or public awareness.” Numbering nearly 3,000 for more than a century now, these facilities have functioned as a win-win in the eyes of government officials. On the one hand, they have allowed policy set in Washington to expand its reach far beyond ports and borders. On the other hand, federal contracts have served as cash cows for local communities, enabling them to expand jail space, cushion budgets, reduce taxes, and create slush funds for local officials. Working with federal authorities has thus long empowered cities and counties to bankroll carceral expansion without having to seek the tax dollars or the approval of voters. Last summer, the sheriff who oversees Butler County Jail in Ohio put it plainly: the federal government “depends on sheriffs and county jails to have bed space,” and his recently renewed ICE contract helps “pay the bills.”

In moving detail, Nofil brings to life the voices of hungry, sick, sweltering, and shivering migrants caught up in the immigration system through the decades, many of whom were driven to suicide or its brink while languishing in detention. One common thread she finds in their stories is the “agonizing uncertainty” of being subject to the whims of state power. Ellen Knauff, a German woman detained in 1948 while trying to enter the country with her American husband, was held for more than a year at Ellis Island; detainees are “shut away from the outside world long enough,” she later observed in a memoir, that “most of them will stop caring about what happens in the world as well as to themselves.” Knauff’s habeas petition went to the Supreme Court, whose ruling helped enshrine the so-called “entry fiction” and plenary power doctrines, depriving entering aliens of due process rights and exempting deportation orders from judicial review in most cases. Nor have justifications for treatment like the kind Knauff faced been solely legalistic. Politicians and policymakers have long portrayed deplorable detention conditions as vital means for deterring immigration or encouraging self-deportation, Nofil shows. Trump’s cruel spectacle of “Alligator Alcatraz”—and for that matter, Obama’s quieter determination to detain families in prison-like conditions—thus cannot be seen as exceptional.

Last summer, a sheriff put it plainly: the federal government “depends on sheriffs and county jails to have bed space,” and his ICE contract helps “pay the bills.”

Perhaps the most striking antecedent of today’s mass deportation campaign is “Operation Wetback,” a federal spectacle launched by the Eisenhower administration in 1953 that remains largely unknown to the public, despite Trump’s many oblique references to it since his first presidential campaign. Over the span of two years, immigration authorities apprehended and removed more than 800,000 Mexican migrants “from work camps, bars, and the streets of American communities, as fawning media coverage celebrated the heroics of the Border Patrol’s war on Mexicans,” Nofil notes. The operation simultaneously entrenched the depiction of migrants as criminals and as an existential, racialized threat. At the time, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner Joseph Swing called migration from Mexico “an actual invasion of the United States,” a message that helped to neutralize claims that deplorable immigration policy was undermining the image of the United States as a beacon of human rights in the Cold War. By the 1970s, many local police and sheriffs’ departments had embraced immigration enforcement as central to crime-fighting. Between 1968 and 1978, the number of migrants turned over to the INS exploded about twelvefold to 120,000 annually thanks to the growing use of “detainer” requests from federal authorities.

This “rebranding” of immigration enforcement as law enforcement only further accelerated the following decade, Nofil shows. Under Attorney General Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice explicitly identified the INS as “a criminal justice agency.” Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, Congress enacted several landmark measures fostering collaboration between the INS and local law enforcement, lengthening the list of deportable offenses and bolstering the government’s capacity to detain citizens and noncitizens alike. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 provided a pathway for millions of unauthorized migrants to legalize their status, but this so-called amnesty legislation also mandated that deportation be carried out “as expeditiously as possible” after someone is found guilty of a deportable offense. To facilitate that, the INS established the Alien Criminal Apprehension Program to share information with local law enforcement, further entrenching their relationship.

And then there were the high-profile crime bills, first under Reagan and then under Bill Clinton, which included provisions for getting tough on noncitizens that received little public attention at the time but wound up fueling the deportation machine. In addition to their infamously discriminatory penalties for possession of crack cocaine, the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 stipulated that noncitizens convicted of an “aggravated felony,” including “nearly all drug offenses,” were subject to deportation. A decade later, a pair of laws signed by Clinton—the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)—enlarged the pool of aggravated felonies, expanded the list of deportable offenses to include certain misdemeanors, and rendered noncitizens subject to deportation for offenses adjudicated years or even decades earlier. Furthermore, the IIRIRA called for mandatory detention for a broad set of immigration violations.

As with all laws, the reach and impact of these measures depended on political will and institutional capacity. The federal government accrued more of both by offering funding and other incentives for local and state authorities to expand the carceral state. The Reagan administration initiated the Cooperative Agreement Program, which granted local governments hundreds of millions of dollars for jail construction in exchange for guarantees that the federal government could use the space, including to detain migrants. The most sweeping of Clinton’s crime bills, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, institutionalized federal reimbursement for the cost of local detainment through the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which has always been rife with fraud and abuse. Programs established in the late 2000s gave both police and correctional authorities quick access to federal biometric databases to check the immigration status not only of people already held in custody but also those stopped for questioning or a minor traffic violation—tools that made it easier both to deport migrants and to make a dollar off doing so.

All the while, the criminal legal system and the immigration enforcement system were knitted ever closer together. Especially significant has been the IIRIRA’s 287(g) program permitting federal immigration authorities to deputize police officers and sheriffs to carry out key functions, including interrogating and arresting people suspected of violating immigration law. Testifying to Congress in 2005, an ICE official told lawmakers the program would target criminals, not the “landscaping type of individuals.” But around half of arrests under the program begin with routine traffic stops. By recruiting localities to be “the foot soldiers of immigration law enforcement” through these and other measures, the federal government “enabled a diffusion of political consequences and further obscured who held power over immigration,” Nofil writes. The wide discretionary power granted to local law enforcement fostered “a form of racialized social control.”

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By the early twenty-first century, the United States was thus already in the throes of what some have called a “crimmigration” or “immcarceration” crisis hiding in plain sight. When ICE was created in 2003—part of the new Department of Homeland Security, established in the wake of the September 11 attacks—it replaced the INS and effectively became the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Prosecutions for immigration-related offenses came to comprise more than half of the federal prosecutorial caseload—up from about 10 to 20 percent during the preceding two decades and far surpassing prosecutions for drug, white-collar, and other offenses.

Yet this “crimmigration” crisis has rarely figured in growing attention to the origins and ills of mass incarceration. Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow (2010) helped thrust the latter phrase into popular consciousness, but it made only passing reference to immigration. Four years later, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a landmark study on mass incarceration’s causes and consequences. The United States had become the world’s warden, the report stressed, locking up more of its people than nearly any other country. But the NAS panel, which I served on, had surprisingly little to say about the role of immigration policy in fueling the carceral state—even as U.S. jails and prisons were detaining record numbers of people on immigration-related charges and migrant advocates were reviling Obama as the “deporter-in-chief.” The government-reported average daily number of ICE detainees has skyrocketed from around 21,000 in 2003 to 73,000 as of this writing in early 2026—the highest on record. But these figures are surely gross undercounts: they do not include people on holds or detainers in local jails and those held by the U.S. Marshals Service, Federal Bureau of Prisons, state detention in Florida and Texas, and secretive holding facilities in ICE offices.

To achieve this growth, the federal government has poured enormous amounts of money into expanding detention capacity of its own. Since ICE’s creation, the agency’s budget has increased nearly fivefold in inflation-adjusted dollars. Between fiscal years 2024 and 2025 alone it tripled to $28.7 billion—about five times the budget of the NYPD and three times that of the FBI—thanks to supplemental funding from the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed last July. Much of this additional spending is earmarked for recruiting thousands of new agents and expanding detention beds to at least 100,000 in order to facilitate the administration’s goal of one million deportations annually. Nofil poignantly reminds us that each so-called detention bed represents “a life and a story, a set of circumstances that led a person to leave their homeland for an unknown life in the United States.”

This expansion of federal capacity over the last two decades came with shifts in the “immigration federalism” at the heart of Nofil’s narrative. Federal officials have long responded to reports of abusive treatment of migrants by scapegoating local authorities, portraying them as racist, uneducated enforcers. No doubt, some of them were, and are. But the attacks have also been part of a strategy: using publicity and lawsuits about abhorrent conditions in local jails to muster support for constructing supposedly humane alternatives under Washington’s direct control. As Nofil illustrates in mournful detail, federal detention facilities have long been rife with abuses themselves.

In a much-needed corrective to accounts that associate mass incarceration primarily or solely with urban centers, Nofil shows that uproars over conditions at facilities close to metro areas prompted “the weaponization of remoteness.” In the last two decades of the twentieth century, federal authorities began seeking out isolated communities for migrant detention, whether in existing jails or newly constructed federal and privately run facilities. Faced with unfavorable developments in one area—uprisings, hunger strikes, lawsuits, high-profile suicides, congressional investigations, growing political opposition, public scrutiny—the INS and now ICE have proven to be masters at disappearing noncitizens (and sometimes citizens) to parts of the country where the political and judicial landscape is more hospitable.

The result has been to build up the carceral heartland, especially in the South and Southwest—states like Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arizona. Well over 1,000 new jails, prisons, and detention centers have been constructed in the United States over the last four decades, disproportionately in rural and remote localities. Sociologist John Eason has documented how widely prisons were once stigmatized throughout the country, even in rural areas, but that changed beginning in the 1970s. With economies in free fall, rural communities wracked by deindustrialization and poverty started competing to become prison towns and hubs for immigration detention. New facilities were no longer seen as a “locally undesirable land use” akin to incinerators and dumps—in the wake of economic devastation and political abandonment, they promised salvation.

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This transformation of the heartland cannot be understood solely in terms of white communities profiting off the caging of people of color. On the contrary, some rural areas with sizable Black and Latino populations welcomed new penal facilities; in many cases, the economic turnaround promised by expanding carceral capacity brought white, Black, and Latino residents together in areas with a history of racial conflict. Nor did all predominantly white communities go along. Nofil cites the example of Roswell, New Mexico, where a contractor failed in its 1983 bid to construct what would have been the first sizable private detention center in the country. One local observer presciently remarked, “Think of the consequences. . . . what civil and human rights could be violated without anyone even knowing it?” But on the whole, the expanding carceral state became an increasingly rural phenomenon.

Two decades ago, with rates of street crime falling and state and local governments facing enormous budgetary pressures, it appeared that the momentum for locking up so many people in the United States might be ebbing. Bipartisan talk of reform, even an air of optimism, came into vogue. And indeed, incarceration rates started to level off and then dip slightly, not least thanks to the growing strength of urban-based criminal justice reform movements that pushed for reduced penalties, alternatives to incarceration, and ending the war on drugs. But downward trends in aggregate rates don’t tell the whole story: while prison admissions have plummeted for residents of big cities, admissions in many rural and smaller metro areas have continued to rise. In the mid-2000s, residents of rural, suburban, and urban areas had about an equal chance of being sent to prison; a decade later, people in small counties were about 50 percent more likely to end up in prison than people in larger urban areas. Since then rates have surged even further. And as economic and political conditions have changed, so have the demographics of the incarcerated. Interlocking systems of punishment, disadvantage, and violence have increasingly spread beyond the hyperincarceration of Black men.

In short, the so-called “era of criminal justice reform” has bypassed much of rural America. With social safety nets even more threadbare than those in urban areas, rural communities lack vital services and programs to keep people out of prison and jail. They also face acute shortages of prosecutors, judges, and public defenders, struggling to provide even basic legal services. But one thing that pockets of rural America do have is enormous carceral capacity and potential. The impact of federal detention contracts on local revenues can be substantial. Between 1980 and 1988, Nofil notes, the annual budget of the sheriff’s office in Louisiana’s Avoyelles Parish more than septupled to $5.5 million as the politically ambitious sheriff of the poor rural town constructed a sprawling migrant detention apparatus. By the end of the decade, his department employed more than 400 deputies—enough “to start an army,” as one resident put it. After state lawmakers approved modest measures to reduce sentences in 2017, officials in another small town, Jackson Parish, faced a bind: With declining revenues, how could they cover jail construction bonds and avoid laying off guards? There and beyond, lucrative ICE contracts have proven the answer.

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The extraordinary expansion of the carceral and deportation apparatus has had far-reaching consequences, including helping to propel the radical rightward shift in U.S. politics. One way it has done so, journalist and lawyer Jessica Pishko shows in The Highest Law in the Land, is by bolstering the clout of powerful, shadowy, and unaccountable sheriffs with deep ties to the far right and white power movement. While the militarization of police departments—especially in major cities—has drawn ever more attention and criticism over the last decade, sheriffs continue to operate with relatively little scrutiny on the national stage. Pishko casts much-needed light on their unique role in the carceral state, the growing political power they wield, and the distinctive threat they pose to democracy.

The picture she paints begins with raw numbers. Employing about a quarter of the country’s uniformed law enforcement officers, the roughly 3,000 sheriffs’ departments spread throughout the United States have many of the same functions and duties as police departments and then some. Not only are sheriffs and their deputies the primary arresting officers in wide swaths of the country, especially rural areas; they also operate 85 percent of local jails, which hold about a third of the U.S. incarcerated population. Many departments are responsible for issuing permits and licenses for firearms as well as overseeing evictions. Many have exploited the expanding carceral state to great financial gain—including by brokering lucrative contracts to house citizens, noncitizens, and migrants, skimping on food and other necessities in penal operations, and taking kickbacks from telephone companies that charge incarcerated people exorbitant rates to make calls. And it’s all profoundly racialized: some 90 percent of sheriffs, Pishko reports, are white men.

With economies in free fall, rural communities started competing to become prison towns and hubs for immigration detention.

Moreover, the system enjoys an unusual degree of autonomy and impunity within the U.S. political order. Unlike police chiefs and state troopers, sheriffs are elected officials who do not report to mayors, city councils, or governors. In much of the country, no one clearly has the power to arrest or remove them from office, even in grievous cases where they have been accused of serious crimes. Over half of all sheriffs’ elections are uncontested, and incumbents virtually always win reelection; it is not uncommon for sheriffs to hold office for forty or even fifty years. One of the most infamous figures in contemporary anti-immigrant politics, Joe Arpaio, served as sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona for almost a quarter-century before finally losing to a Democratic challenger in 2017. Styling himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Arpaio faced numerous misconduct charges and civil rights lawsuits over the course of his career and became a vocal supporter of Trump after leaving office. The president pardoned him in 2017 for contempt of federal court after a judge ordered Arpaio to stop detaining people solely on suspicion of being undocumented and the sheriff kept doing so, even bragging to PBS NewsHour: “I’m still going to do what I’m doing.”

Arpaio is hardly an isolated exception. Pishko illuminates the stakes and scale of sheriffs’ power by chronicling the rise of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). Founded in 2011 by Richard Mack, another onetime sheriff in Arizona, the organization portrays sheriffs as bulwarks against tyranny, stewards of the Constitution, and the embodiment of public will. As such, CSPOA claims, sheriffs have the right and authority to resist laws and policies that violate the Constitution as they interpret it—from gun restrictions to mask mandates and abortion rights.

Although only a minority of sheriffs belong to Mack’s organization, the group has played an outsize role in mainstreaming far-right ideas. Under Reagan, the main professional organization for sheriffs, the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA), supported modest gun control measures; now it is more or less totally aligned with the hard-line stance of the National Rifle Association, which named Mack its officer of the year in 1994. Three-quarters of New Mexico’s sheriffs identify their counties as “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” Pishko notes—areas where state and federal gun control laws are not enforced. Though the NSA has disavowed Mack’s claims in the past, “it has not made an official statement about the constitutional sheriff movement in over a decade,” Pishko stresses. Sheriffs have also been key messengers in raising public doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections even as they trumpet their own elected status as a token of political legitimacy. They were central figures in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and they have been at the forefront of growing efforts to intimidate get-out-the-vote groups and interfere in election administration, asserting a dubious constitutional right to deputize private citizens to assist in allegations of voter fraud.

The legacy of the Jim Crow South thus in many ways endures. In still further echoes of that period, Pishko recounts chilling examples of sheriffs working hand-in-hand with right-wing militias, just as sheriffs in the South often allied with the Ku Klux Klan. Mack himself has been a board member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist organization whose founder was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. (Trump commuted his eighteen-year sentence last year.) During the national wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, armed militias throughout the country organized counterprotests with the explicit or tacit support of sheriffs. Pishko relates a particularly disturbing incident in which one department failed to intervene as militia members swarmed a group of Black Lives Matter activists marching in the small town of Minden, Nevada, in August that year. Officers stood aside while six hundred or more militia members and their supporters, many heavily armed, threatened, spat upon, and assaulted protesters; one man appeared to intentionally target demonstrators when he drove his pickup truck into them, striking two teenage girls.

In all this, The Highest Law in the Land masterfully excavates how sheriffs have fomented political violence, especially in areas far from the national spotlight. It also documents the gruesome and inhumane conditions endemic to local jails that sheriffs preside over. But there is even more that could be said to substantiate the antidemocratic threat posed by sheriffs’ departments and local police alike—namely, through the quotidian violence of everyday law enforcement itself. U.S. rates of lethal use of force dwarf those in every other wealthy democracy, yet geographic disparities are not widely appreciated. Part of the reason is the “fetish of secrecy” that shrouds policing in the United States, as legal scholar Barry Friedman has put it. Reliable figures aren’t collected and maintained by the government, and even data and records that do exist are hard to access. But according to the best available estimates, about three-quarters of police killings of civilians took place in rural and suburban areas last year, and sheriffs’ departments are responsible for a disproportionate and growing share—more than a third as of year-end.

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What is to be done? In The Minneapolis Reckoning, sociologist Michelle S. Phelps convincingly demonstrates that stemming police violence is highly dependent on grasping and navigating the nuances of local politics. She makes this case through a granular case study of efforts to reform the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) between 2017 and 2023—the years leading up to and following Floyd’s death and the mobilization of millions of protesters across the country calling for change. As the city once again reckons with explosive state violence and repression following the killing of unarmed civilians, Phelps’s book provides tragically timely insight into the obstacles facing renewed calls to defund the police and rein in the carceral-deportation complex more broadly.

In the aftermath of Floyd’s killing—and in the shadow of years, even decades, of activism to reform policing in the city—the Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a ballot initiative aimed at amending the city’s charter so as to replace a section on the MPD with new text calling for the creation of a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention. The key difference was that the language for the former required funding a minimum number of cops per capita, whereas the latter would permit but not require police officers. While the immediate practical significance of the change may have been vague, it hardly amounted in itself to defunding or abolishing the police, but many opponents and proponents of the measure characterized it as such. In the end, a legally prescribed commission for reviewing all proposed amendments originating with the city council voted to keep the proposal off the 2020 ballot. Thanks to a citizen-led initiative, the proposal did appear on the ballot a year later, but it was defeated in a highly contentious election in which Mayor Jacob Frey, who opposed the measure, was reelected.

For a variety of reasons, Phelps shows, the MPD and its allies succeeded in pitting concerns about police violence against concerns about community violence. The department was facing a legitimacy crisis as officers left in droves, morale sank, community ties were strained to the breaking point, and the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the city’s long and troubling pattern of running roughshod over civil and constitutional rights. Meanwhile a steep spike in homicides beginning in 2020, fueled by the turbulent social disruption of COVID-19, divided potential allies for comprehensive reform. Medaria Arradondo, the department’s first Black chief, told a youth task force in July 2021, “The biggest threat to public safety in our city, specifically the African American community” was not the police. “We have an epidemic right now of unequivocal gun violence, particularly in our African American communities, and that must stop.” In the end, such opposition, in these conditions, helped law enforcement reclaim the mantle of public safety heroism. But although efforts to overhaul policing in Minneapolis ultimately failed, they loosened the MPD’s “stranglehold on city politics—opening up more space for radical imagination,” Phelps concludes.

One resident presciently remarked, “Think of the consequences. . . . what civil and human rights could be violated without anyone even knowing it?”

In Copaganda, civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis further illuminates what the radical imagination is up against, mapping the “gulf between the image and the reality of the punishment bureaucracy” and the powerful institutions that “influence how we think about crime and safety.” His principal targets aren’t Fox News and the New York Post—brash champions of law enforcement—so much as legacy print and TV media (the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR as much as MSNBC, CNN, and ABC News) and local news organizations (where they still exist). Under the guise of neutrality, he persuasively argues, these pillars of mainstream journalism produce stories, sometimes based on the work of criminologists at top universities and often in close collaboration with law enforcement agencies themselves, that effectively function as propaganda. The effect is to conceal the staggering scale of abuse in the system, manufacture consent for an ever-expanding carceral state, and inoculate police and the broader criminal legal system from comprehensive reform and democratic control.

Such “copaganda” can take many forms, Karakatsanis explains. It stokes public fears of crime by misrepresenting crime trends and minimizing or ignoring violence committed by law enforcement and prison guards. It covers street and violent crime in wild disproportion both to its actual frequency and to white-collar crime and corporate malfeasance. It promotes more police and prisons as solutions to crime panics even though a mountain of evidence undermines the idea that expanding the carceral apparatus enhances public safety. And it denigrates or marginalizes efforts to attack the root causes of crime, from greater investment in public education to affordable housing, a robust safety net, and universal health care.

In addition to the dissemination of copaganda through news media, Karakatsanis also documents the growing capacity of law enforcement to shape public opinion through their own booming public relations operations. While the Chicago Tribune was hemorrhaging jobs over the last decade, the PR arm of the Chicago Police Department mushroomed from six full-time employees in 2015 to fifty-five as of last year, Karakatsanis reports. All the while, police and law enforcement organizations have become increasingly sophisticated about managing their image—from ghostwriting op-eds and testing messages on focus groups to generously funding sympathetic academics, publishing slick PR videos on social media, and more.

For Karakatsanis, one of the most egregious effects of copaganda has been to misrepresent small-bore changes in police policy as transformative reforms of the system. In reality, he documents, many of the most widely discussed or even celebrated proposals, from body cameras to calls for greater training, not only do not rein in the policing apparatus but often help expand it. What’s more, after the seemingly reasonable reform du jour fails to stem state violence or abuse of power, the public conversation in mainstream media and newsrooms moves on to another modest proposal, continuing to paint calls for more thoroughgoing change as unreasonable and dangerous radicalism. It is easier for academics, journalists, and other opinion makers to get attention, Karakatsanis writes, “if they can propose some novel tweak that people in power want as opposed to harping about structural inequality for the umpteenth time.” The “hamster wheel of tweaks” we are trapped on, he concludes, “not only distracts people from thinking about root causes” of crime. It perpetuates the misguided search for “the new idea that will change things without having to change things.”

Will resurgent demands to abolish ICE—the rallying cry that first achieved national prominence during Trump’s first term—ultimately meet the same fate that efforts to reform the police did in Minneapolis and around the country? As prominent Democrats call for more training for immigration officers and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem now advocates equipping federal officers with body cameras, another iteration of the cycle that Karakatsanis identifies looks to be in the offing. Together, The Minneapolis Reckoning and Copaganda suggest the outcome of democratic movements for change is highly sensitive to both the complex interplay of public demands and existing institutions in particular contexts and the news and narratives conveyed by the media.

But the brutality of Trump’s war on immigrants and protesters—along with the massive and growing scale of public outrage and resistance—may be radically changing whatever calculus seemed set in stone even just a few weeks ago. The current federal assault on Minneapolis threatens to rupture the delicate rebuilding of the MPD and the fragile détente forged between the police, residents, and the city’s political leadership in the years since Floyd’s death. Mayor Frey, reelected once again last November, has enjoined ICE to “get the fuck out of” Minneapolis; he has also stated that he opposes abolishing the agency. This much we can say: achieving meaningful reform is sure to entail one battle after another for the foreseeable future in which public pressure, broad-based coalitions, and clear-eyed analysis of the forces at play are essential to rolling back this wide-scale state violence and abuse.

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Marie Gottschalk is Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, and, most recently, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America.