Turner III, JackMcCann, Michael WYoung, Dennis Michael Sewell2024-09-092024-09-092024-09-092024Young_washington_0250E_26794.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/52158Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2024This dissertation examines the politics of bureaucratic development in the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with attention to the ways that bureaucratic processes and policymaking shape racial hierarchy in the contemporary era. I argue that contemporary bureaucracies primarily shape race by working to expand and enhance their department’s bureaucratic capacity through modernization and efficiency improving processes. Within each agency, bureaucrats work towards producing efficiency and attempt to demonstrate success in ways that are facially race-neutral but in fact rely upon racial imaginaries. In the context of homeland security, a racial and carceral imagination of who is an “illegal” immigrant undergirds the department as a whole. As such, when bureaucrats work to optimize the departmental processes, the result is improving and expanding tools of social control such as immigrant surveillance, detention, and deportation. This phenomenon is racialized because the primary targets of the enforcement apparatus are Latinx, and as a more efficient architecture is built, the DHS is better able to police the Latinx migrant community. I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to argue that a major impact of bureaucratic development is inducing thoughtlessness amongst DHS bureaucrats. Here, thoughtlessness refers to the inability to see outside of the work of bureaucracy to examine the particular harm done to those on the other end of the policy. Bureaucrats are institutionally incentivized to focus on performance optimization and in doing so, the human consequences of immigration enforcement are hidden from bureaucrats. To make this argument, I conducted an archival analysis of around 32,000 pages of internal bureaucratic documents from the DHS. This document set spans the time from 2002-2022 and includes documentation such as inspections, FOIA documents, email correspondence, and departmental memoranda. I support this primary document analysis with historical analysis and theoretical work, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Max Weber, as well as critical scholarship on immigration and race such as the work of Mae Ngai, Kelly Tuttle Hernandez, and Patricia Macias-Rojas. To more concretely examine this phenomenon, I center each empirical chapter around a theme of bureaucratic development that I argue has played a major role in expanding the DHS’ role in homeland security. The first empirical chapter focuses on the role of data and metrics in supporting a carceral imagination of homeland security. In this chapter, I argue that the DHS’ focus on carceral solutions to the problem of immigration has led to the use of increasingly granular and seemingly objective performance metrics. However, these metrics reify ideas of homeland security that focus on detaining and deporting racialized immigrant groups with little regard for the human costs of this form of enforcement. My second chapter examines the role of modernization discourse in leading to expanded immigrant surveillance. This chapter focuses on how an internal bureaucratic desire for modernized technology has helped substantiate increased surveillance of immigrant communities and a drive for perfect information. The further the DHS pushes in this direction, the more effectively it is able to surveil and police immigrant communities. My final empirical chapter examines how demands for efficiency have driven the DHS into increased reliance on the private sector. Because the private sector is often understood as more efficient than government, the DHS has been systematically incentivized to work more closely with corporations. The result is a massive industry and investment in homeland security, which sustains the racial project of immigration enforcement. The conclusion focuses on how to remedy the harms of bureaucracy, focusing on practices of institutional transformation and care in order to address the harms I describe in the empirical chapters. I conclude by suggesting that there is an urgent need for both radical change in immigration law and the necessity of bureaucratic change in order to promote immigrant justice.application/pdfen-USnoneAmerican PoliticsBureaucracyImmigrationPolitical TheoryRacePolitical sciencePolitical scienceThesis