This dissertation focuses on the legal geographies of the U.S. immigration court system and its role within the broader project of immigration policing, detention, and deportation. The fieldwork for the project comes from interviews, courtroom observation, archival research, and participant observation with attorneys and their clients. I draw upon the work of political geographers who theorize borders as contingent phenomena which is dispersed unevenly across space, creating new geographies of legal vulnerability for immigrants. Immigration courts are spaces which connect the everyday practice of immigration law and politics with the rise of restrictive and punitive immigration control regimes, and provides significant insights into what it means to become illegalized through law. The production of immigrant illegality through the courts depends upon a regime of knowledges and practices that inscribe immigrants into the legal logic of territorial states. I call this a 'legal epistemology of illegality'. This legal epistemology depends upon geographic imaginaries of sending countries, purposefully ambiguous moral codes, documented and suspected criminality, sexual and racial identities, family relations, and competing narratives of self-sufficiency and victimhood. As a result, undocumented immigrants, illegal aliens, or 'bogus' asylees are not pre-existing objects of governance, but are subjects that have already had something done to them by the state. By calling into question the stability of legal status, I challenged the widespread uncritical acceptance of immigration status as a self-evident legal fact.
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