Spectacles of immigration enforcement in the United States

Since January 2025, the second Trump administration has implemented an unprecedented array of dizzying and draconian changes to reduce the number of immigrants in the United States. 

This talk will describe these changes and then focus on the deliberate spectacularisation of immigration enforcement, through the administration's dissemination of videos depicting immigrants being deported - often set to music - and through mass enforcement operations in “blue” states.  

We can see the Trump administration's immigration enforcement as a theater of power. Yet immigration enforcement is also characterised by its hidden aspects, suggesting a complex relationship between state power and sight.

The Trump administration's actions in immigration enforcement (as well as in other domains) raises many questions about what is happening to legality in the United States. Here Volpp will discuss the surge of contemporary interest in the United States in the concept of the “dual state."

Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice at the University of California at Berkeley. Volpp is a scholar of immigration law and citizenship theory whose research examines how law is shaped by culture and identity.

Chair: Christine M. Jacobsen, professor of social anthropology, UiB.

Light lunch will be served from 12:00.

The seminar is free and open to all!