Bringing Back Justice, Editorial Introduction: Heath Cabot
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, this White House has presented the world with waves of chaotic and blustering forms of speech: factually false statements in press conferences; deliberate leaks; ubiquitous tweets. Often, this administration seems to have catapulted the US into the dystopian future, to a time and place in which the real – the knowledge that the senses convey – gives way to the surreal, as the new president tries to shape the world according to what he chooses to say…
On Trump’s Executive Order: Nicole Constable
As a naturalized U.S. citizen and as a scholar of migration, I consider Donald Trump’s executive order that indefinitely bars Syrian refugees, suspends refugee admission for 120 days, restricts immigration from seven Muslim countries, and rescinds visas from over 60,000 people already in the U.S. discriminatory, xenophobic, counter-productive, heartless and destructive. The executive order was passed with no consideration given to the human side of things, to those whose lives are or will be deeply affected…
Doing Bad By Stealth? Anthony Good
While the Trump administration’s arbitrary curbs on would-be refugees are provoking demonstrations worldwide, it is ironic to reflect that many of the demonstrators live in countries where immigration rules are just as restrictive, though less overtly discriminatory regarding nationality and religion. Such is certainly the case in the United Kingdom, thanks to the actions of successive Labour and Tory régimes. Why have this week’s demonstrators not directed similar protests against their own governments?…
Cruel, But Not Unusual: Tobias Kelly
Seen from this side of the Atlantic, Trump’s Executive Orders on immigration and refugees certainly seem cruel, but not that unusual. The center ground of European politics has long treated immigration as a problem to be solved, rather than an opportunity to embrace. Racist, arbitrary and restrictive migration regimes are the norm rather than the exception. Although the history of the U.S. is full of racialized border controls, one of the refreshing things about America for a European is that immigration was, in relative terms, not widely treated as a pathology…
The Narcissist and the Nationalist: John Torpey
Scarcely one week into his presidency, Donald J. Trump issued an executive order barring from the United States all refugees for 120 days, all Syrian refugees until further notice, and all passport-holders from seven Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen), none of which had been the country of origin of any terrorist killers in the United States since 9/11. The countries of origin of the 9/11 attackers, who came chiefly from Saudi Arabia, were not among them…
Refuge, Recognition, and Resistance, Editorial Introduction Part 2: Jennifer Curtis
In the past few weeks, my mother has taken to texting me on Fridays: “The time is now a quarter to Shabbat. Brace yourself.” Her semi-joking message references the “Shabbat theory” of the Trump administration, which holds that its most shocking actions, like Executive Order 13769, are unveiled when his daughter and son-in-law observe Shabbat and retreat from electronic devices. The theory implies that Trump’s family acts as an important check on the administration….
Trumps, Pirates, Refugees, and Terrorists: Sébastien Bachelet
A “Muslim-majority” country, Morocco – a place not (yet) on Trump’s travel ban, was allegedly the first country to recognize the United States of America in the late 1770s. Much has changed since George Washington wrote to Muhammed Ibn Abdullah in 1789 to thank the Sultan for his efforts in preventing pirates in the Mediterranean from attacking American vessels and to assure him that the young American nation, bereft of riches yet endowed with industrious people…
A Distorted Image of Immigrants: Susan Bibler Coutin
The three immigration-related executive orders that the Trump administration issued during its first two weeks in office present a distorted image of immigrants as criminals, terrorists, and dangerous. While this is not surprising, given Donald Trump’s statements as a candidate, it is worth interrogating this image to understand how the executive orders draw on but also seek to shape understandings of immigrants that circulate in the popular imagination…
The Dangers of Exceptionalism: Nisrin Elamin
I was one of over 100 people detained at U.S. airports in late January, under President Trump’s executive order barring citizens of Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya from entering the country. I was doing dissertation research in Sudan, when conversations about a leaked draft of the order prompted me to catch the next flight back to the U.S. There was barely enough time to say goodbye to my parents. After missing a connecting flight in London, I arrived at JFK airport…
A Few Snapshots of The U.S. Borders: Shahram Khosravi
In May 2013, I arrived at Chicago O’Hare Airport, on my way to a workshop in Irvine. It was early, around 4 am. The border control officer was weary but not too sleepy to let me pass through just like others, many of them Swedish passport holders just like me. I had something extra, though—my Iranian background, marked both on my passport and my body. He gave me a form to fill out. No pen at his kiosk, so he went to find one…
Versions of Humanity, Introduction Part 3: Catherine Besteman
Last Thursday I experienced first hand the U.S.’s vast ideological divide. In the afternoon, I gave an author talk to a book club based at a local university who had read my book about Somali refugees in Maine. In the evening I attended a talk at the same university by a conservative Maine State Representative titled “Alien Invasion.” The two events captured the stark discord in the U.S. about immigration and left me breathless with the extent to which we are truly polarized as a nation…
Chaos and Fear in the Wake of Trump’s Executive Orders: Anne Knight
I am a corporate lawyer in New York with experience working pro bono on asylum cases and refugee issues. When the Executive Order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and temporarily suspending admission of all refugees went into effect, I joined a group of lawyers and other volunteers at JFK Airport in New York. We ran a round-the-clock free legal clinic in JFK’s main terminal for 10 days, which is now being managed offsite. The clinic started organically in the first 24 hours after the Executive Order was signed…
“HOME” DOES NOT EQUAL “CITIZENSHIP”: SARA SHNEIDERMAN
Where is home? For any of us? What does it mean to belong? Since the executive order on immigration was signed, I’ve been haunted by a photograph taken by my great uncle David Seymour “Chim” in a Warsaw orphanage in 1948. In it, Tereszka, a displaced child, draws a picture of “home.” Tereszka’s eyes have been with me since I can remember, a reminder of the lucky circumstances of history that enabled my grandparents to build a new home in the US…
MAKE AMERICA ISRAEL AGAIN: NIKOLAS KOSMATOPOULOS
Let me find time to prophesy / the coming of the flood. —Nizar Qabbani. I found refuge—and resistance—in the feminist and subversive poetry of Qabbani while being “screened” by Border Police and Homeland Security agents at Newark Airport only a few hours after my arrival from Beirut via Paris, only a few days after the implementation of the so-called “Muslim Ban” by the new United States government…
WHEN THERE IS NO SOLID GROUND: SHARIKA THIRANAGAMA
On a Saturday evening at San Francisco airport, I was chanting with others gathered there “Let Them Out” and “Let the Lawyers In,” a demand for those detained under President Trump’s Executive Order at the Customs and Border Protection to be released and given access to lawyers. As I stood there in this airport and this political moment, I recalled being a seventeen year old detained with my father at Frankfurt Airport in Germany…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 
