Michele Waslin

Uses eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members to examine how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States.

Explores the evolution and convergence of driver's license laws at the state level and federal policies regarding collaboration with local law enforcement agencies. These two policies combined have resulted in higher numbers of arrests and deportations for driving-related violations.

Discusses how the Obama administration's efforts to demonstrate how committed it was to removing criminals and others who remain in the country without proper documentation - in order to gain support for comprehensive immigration reform - exacerbated the potential for profiling and pretextual arrests, which in turn took the focus off of serious criminals and led to the arrest of large numbers of people for minor offenses. In part, this was because the administration lost the ability to fully control their own enforcement priorities and enforcement outcomes, and the results demonstrated that the state and local partners were not necessarily committed to the same priorities. Other factors at the state and local level also removed ICE from the decision-making process at the critical early stages.