Legal Phantoms - by Susan Bibler Coutin & Jennifer M Chacón & Stephen Lee

About the Book

"The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was supposed to be a stepping stone, a policy innovation announced by the White House designed to put pressure on Congress for a broader, lasting set of legislative changes. Those changes never materialized, and the people who hoped to benefit from them have been forced to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by these unfulfilled promises. Legal Phantoms tells their story. After Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013, President Obama pivoted in 2014 to supplementing DACA with a deferred action program (known as DAPA) for the parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents and a DACA expansion (DACA ) in 2014. But challenges from Republican-led states prevented even these programs from going into effect. Interviews with would-be applicants, immigrant-rights advocates, and government officials reveal how such failed immigration-reform efforts continue to affect not only those who had hoped to benefit, but their families, communities, and the country in which they have made an uneasy home. Out of the ashes of these lost dreams, though, people find their own paths forward through uncharted legal territory with creativity and resistance"--

Book Synopsis

The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was supposed to be a stepping stone, a policy innovation announced by the White House designed to put pressure on Congress for a broader, lasting set of legislative changes. Those changes never materialized, and the people who hoped to benefit from them have been forced to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by these unfulfilled promises. Legal Phantoms tells their story.

After Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013, President Obama pivoted in 2014 to supplementing DACA with a deferred action program (known as DAPA) for the parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents and a DACA expansion (DACA+) in 2014. But challenges from Republican-led states prevented even these programs from going into effect. Interviews with would-be applicants, immigrant-rights advocates, and government officials reveal how such failed immigration-reform efforts continue to affect not only those who had hoped to benefit, but their families, communities, and the country in which they have made an uneasy home. Out of the ashes of these lost dreams, though, people find their own paths forward through uncharted legal territory with creativity and resistance.

Review Quotes

"Legal Phantoms: Executive Action and the Haunting Failures of Immigration Law serves as a stark reminder that policy choices and legal regulations are not abstract; they have profound consequences on individuals' lives, families, societies, and even transcend borders. The authors, drawing on their legal expertise and extensive fieldwork, critique the flawed immigration system in the US, a system that is not unique to this country."--Itır Aladağ Görentaş, Border Criminologies

"Showing just how political children's lives are, and how important it is to take them seriously as political actors if we truly wish to understand their place in society, remains one of the main tenants of critical childhood and children's rights scholarship. Luttrell Rowland's book is an important contribution to this body of work, as it seeks to expose and understand the various ways in which state power operates by listening to two different groups of children whose lives are characterized by structural violence, poverty, and work."--Edward van Daalen, Law & Society Review

"Legal Phantoms is a must read for all people interested in better understanding the historical and contemporary forces behind anti-immigration movements and the contributions of immigrants and their families to local communities and society at large. In the face of extreme anti-immigrant distrust and hate across the country--from border communities to mainstream America to the White House--Legal Phantoms offers positive transformation and progress toward social change, equality, and justice in difficult and uncertain times.... Highly recommended." --M. G. Urbina, CHOICE

"Legal Phantoms is the rare book that captures both the structural and human costs imposed by America's patchwork approach to immigration. It offers richly faceted analysis of how DACA has operated, its relationship to racist crimmigration regimes, and the tolls of temporariness on recipients. This is urgent reading for anyone who is concerned with immigrant precarity." --Elizabeth Cohen, Boston University

"As policy questions around migration remain central to the American political debate, [Legal Phantoms] bring[s] insight into the intricacies of migration regimes, the everyday experiences of migrants and refugees that navigate them, and the activists and community organizations that advocate for their rights." --Matthew Canfield and Smoki Musaraj, Political and Legal Anthropologyl Review

"Impressive in focus and scope and meticulously researched, Legal Phantoms renders accessible the mesmerizing complexity of the immigration system that spews temporality into immigrants' lives while humanizing those who are entangled in its web. This superb team of scholars has crafted a lasting, indispensable resource for scholars, policy makers, and anyone who cares about immigrants today." --Cecilia Menjívar, University of California-Los Angeles

About the Author

Jennifer M. Chacón is Bruce Tyson Mitchell Professor of Law at Stanford School of Law. She is co-author of the casebook Immigration Law and Social Justice (2017). Susan Bibler Coutin is Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence (2016), among many others. Stephen Lee is Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.