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How Interior Immigration Enforcement Affects Trust in Law Enforcement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2020

Tom K. Wong Open the ORCID record for Tom K. Wong [Opens in a new window] ,
S. Deborah Kang ,
Carolina Valdivia ,
Josefina Espino Open the ORCID record for Josefina Espino [Opens in a new window] ,
Michelle Gonzalez  and
Elia Peralta
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Abstract

The day-to-day behaviors of undocumented immigrants are significantly affected when local law enforcement officials do the work of federal immigration enforcement. One such behavior, which has been widely discussed in debates over so-called sanctuary policies, is that undocumented immigrants are less likely to report crimes to the police when local law enforcement officials work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on federal immigration enforcement. However, the mechanism that explains this relationship of decreased trust in law enforcement has not yet been systematically tested. Do undocumented immigrants become less trusting of police officers and sheriffs when local law enforcement officials work with ICE on federal immigration enforcement? To answer this, we embedded an experiment that varied the interior immigration enforcement context in a survey (n = 512) drawn from a probability-based sample of undocumented immigrants. When local law enforcement officials work with ICE on federal immigration enforcement, respondents are statistically significantly less likely to say that they trust that police officers and sheriffs will keep them, their families, and their communities safe; will protect the confidentiality of witnesses to crimes even if they are undocumented; will protect the rights of all people equally, including undocumented immigrants; and will protect undocumented immigrants from abuse or discrimination.

Type
Special Section: The Politics of Immigration
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 357 - 370
Copyright
© American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

Please direct inquiries to Tom K. Wong, tomkwong@ucsd.edu. We are especially grateful to the Mexican Consulate in San Diego. We are also grateful to Cynthia Hinojosa, Julissa Limatu, Sary Perdomo, Laura Santos, and Jeremiah Cha for their assistance. We also thank participants at the Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Consortium (PRIEC) meeting at UC San Diego, UCLA Race and Ethnicity workshop, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, UC San Diego migration workshop, and UC San Diego faculty workshop for their insightful comments. Research design: TKW. Literature Review: TKW, DK, CV, JE, MG, EP. Analysis: TKW.

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at:https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0NVQK4.

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Supplementary material: Link

Wong et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0NVQK4
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