“There are commonalities that we overlook because our ideas about documentedness and citizenship and race cloud our vision to seeing the ways in which we actually share and we struggle together.”
Austin Kocher describes the human costs behind today’s deportation data.
Just days after Dr. Austin Kocher described the inconsistency between Trump’s immigration rhetoric and the realities of his actions, those inconsistencies were shattered. Images of armed and masked federal agents taking individuals in unmarked cars were not yet a common occurrence on our social media feeds. And while Dr. Kocher’s description of his process of tracking ICE data was offered before the rapid escalation of ICE activities in June, the fundamental points of his work are perhaps even more relevant today.
Ultimately, this second half of our conversation illuminates how to interpret the tools and activities of the U.S. immigration system. More importantly, Kocher’s work reflects the ways these systems impact individuals and families every day.
ANTERO GARCIA: You’ve been diving into the actual numbers behind deportation and detention. Until recently, those numbers have been surprising to me each time you dive in. From your perspective, what kinds of trends have you been seeing?
AUSTIN KOCHER: It’s very tricky. In the immigration space, we kind of have this trade-off. If you want to get good data about immigration, you can either get relatively recent data that the agency puts out to the public, or you get really good data through public records requests that takes 12 to 36 months. As a researcher, if it takes two years to publish something, you just don't care that much about what's super, super current. However, once I started talking to journalists and started writing for a more public audience, people want to know what's going on now. So what I've had to do is to figure out what are the data sources that are up-to-date and write about those and then also write in a more detailed way about other data that I'm getting to use on a more academic timeline.
Congress requires ICE to release data on immigrant detention about every two weeks. And having worked with that data for three years now, I feel pretty comfortable that I've followed it over time and I've noticed enough of where the mistakes are--sometimes they make mistakes when they release the data. So I know what to look for, I know how to validate it. Sometimes there's periods where there's not a lot of change so I just try to keep people up to date with it.
AG: Unless I'm misinterpreting what you’ve been writing, a lot of the data isn’t nearly to the degree of what Trump has claimed to do. Maybe a week from now, this could all be completely different, but is that interpretation right?
AK: Yeah, that's exactly a correct way to characterize it. Right after Trump won the election, I wrote this post that basically said, "Look, here's what we're going to see. There's going to be three words that characterize this Trump administration: volatility, hypocrisy, and cruelty." Those have played out. And one of the ways that they've played out is that Trump, as we know, is very invested in images and headlines and far more interested in stories that circulate widely regardless of whether or not they're true. And that's a lot of how the White House is thinking about measuring their effectiveness. It just doesn't always match up with reality.
I always try to balance how I share the data. I don't want people to look at what I'm reading and think I'm saying, everything's fine. It's really bad for a lot of people. It just is.
As a writer, how do I communicate in a way that's clear and digestible to people who aren't trained in academic writing? How do I balance the writing with acknowledging people's real experiences? I want someone to be able to hand my posts off to a family member who is a little skeptical, who's maybe a little Trumpy, and to be able to read it and go, "Okay, maybe I don't agree with everything, but I trust this person enough that I'll keep reading."
AG: Let’s pivot to the human consequences of this data. This site is called La Cuenta to reflect the hidden costs to being undocumented in this country. And so if we could create a bill of the invisible costs of surviving while being labeled undocumented in this country, what costs does your work demonstrate?
AK: That's a fantastic question. So, while I was getting my PhD, I started and ran a worker center for a little while. We were working a lot with questions of wage theft and for me it was a real opportunity to advocate, but also just to be witness to these things. I grew up with a single mom with four kids. A good part of my youth was we just didn't have much. And I saw my own mother doing the best that she could to make ends meet to, you iron for friends, or you do laundry, you clean houses, or whatever it takes to try to keep your family together, and to raise kids.
And that's all a lot of working people are doing, including immigrants, including undocumented folks. There's a lot in common between what my mom did to try to raise her kids and what undocumented parents and moms are doing for their kids. I mean, we're trying to survive in capitalism and we're trying to make ends meet and we're trying not to get sick. We're trying not to miss days at work because we don't have healthcare, all this stuff.
I guess in some ways, one of the messages that I like to try to communicate is how there are experiences that are very unique to undocumented people. There's vulnerabilities that I will never understand. And there are commonalities that we overlook because our ideas about documentedness and citizenship and race cloud our vision to seeing the ways in which we actually share and we struggle together.
“There's a lot in common between what my mom did to try to raise her kids and what undocumented parents and moms are doing for their kids.”
AG: That’s so powerful.
AK: There is another part of that answer, which is sort of less personal, which is related to people who are facing deportation in court. So there's 4 million people right now, potentially more, who have pending deportation cases. They're just waiting to find out if a judge is going to order them deported. And I started theorizing this when I was doing my graduate research on the immigration courts and really thinking about what it means to be in this removal proceedings population because there's this invisible price. There's actually a very real price to paying for an attorney, going to immigration court, taking a day off work, all that stuff that's difficult to do. But there's also this invisible toll, this invisible cost of just living in limbo for 2 to 10 years.
And so when I've talked to friends or I've talked to people I've interviewed, it's like, do we buy a house? Do I buy a car? Do I send my kids to a good school? Are my kids going to be able to finish school in the United States? What happens if we get ordered deported and my son is a junior in high school? He now has to leave his friend. Am I going to leave my son here if he's a citizen or if he can stay? And so there's all these kinds of, these constant, you can never settle. You're constantly, even if you have settled, even if you're staying put in a way, our system forces people to always be perpetually on the move or always ready to move. And it's like you're living out a suitcase your whole life, even if you have the same apartment.
“There's actually a very real price to paying for an attorney, going to immigration court, taking a day off work, all that stuff that's difficult to do. But there's also this invisible toll, this invisible cost of just living in limbo for 2 to 10 years.”
AG: That's a great context. You basically spend this time wondering if you will be deemed worthy in the eyes of the state. Which in and of itself is a fraught context.
AK: Absolutely. And it does open up a little bit because I've done some research on deportation defense campaigns and sanctuary church acts. One of the things that's interesting is the way that the state operates and its moral or lack of moral compass. There's a lot of opportunity for us, as people who aren't in these agencies, to remind the public that we don't actually have to share the same moral and ethical framework that the state's imposing. And maybe the louder that we are, the more it highlights the dissonance between what the government's trying to do in our name as citizens and what we actually believe.
Propina
We are incredibly grateful for Dr. Kocher’s time sharing his work with La Cuenta. If you don’t subscribe to his Substack, check it out here.
If you missed the first part of our conversation you can find it here:
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