Abstract
This Article argues that a meaningful conception of privacy renders borders illegitimate. For those present in a nation state without legal authorization, pursuit of their basic rights carries the real risk that identifying information collected will expose them to immigration enforcement. Such a phenomenon is becoming more real considering an expanding border enforcement apparatus that relies on information transfer from various domains of daily life. As a result, people are not able to exercise the rights to which they are entitled. Rights are meaningless in an environment where they are unable to exercise them. This Article is a response to liberal theorizing that aims to reconcile the state’s right to control its borders with its duties to all who are present in the nation state, including those who lack legal authorization. Using autoethnography and the author’s lived experience, this Article argues that the failure to make rights real moves beyond ineffectiveness and not only causes harms to illegalized people, but also stands as an imperious—yet not indestructible— barrier between law and a just world. This Article presents a unique contribution to the burgeoning literature on border abolition by highlighting the real effects that the fear of deportation has on those who are targets for the violence of the state yet ineligible for its protection.
The Article’s main interlocutors are Joseph Carens’s proposal of a “firewall” between immigration enforcement and the protection of immigrants’ basic human rights. Further, a 2018 report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed that the fear of deportation deters illegalized immigrants from reporting crimes lest they risk exposure to immigration enforcement. The report’s authors concluded that immigrants’ reluctance to report crimes or participate in court proceedings compromises the criminal justice system’s ability to protect public safety. Though helpful in many ways, the “firewalls” concept does not account for government intrusion in nonbasic rights domains, which influence whether legal rights are realized in practice.
