Fear and Loathing in the Homeland Security State: A Bourdieusian Account for the Expansion of ICE

Since the passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has used police and carceral power to entrench its operations against criminalized immigrant communities in New York City. This article argues that to understand this process, homeland security actions must be seen as a form of symbolic and physical violence that ascertains legitimacy through an internal dialogue within the very bureaucracies of the state itself, and are sanctified by broader historic structural relations, as per Bourdieu’s understanding of the state manifesting in bureaucratic and discursive ways. Through an examination of 148 federal documents, this article will conduct an institutional ethnography-informed intertextual analysis of how ICE has expanded into New York City, arguing that through the courting of broader moral panics concerning race, national security, and crime, a Homeland Security State has converted migration management into security management, reifying a binary between the “good” and “bad” immigrant.