Abstract

Excerpted From: Stephen Lee, Immigration Law’s Foot Soldiers Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality, by Irene I. Vega (Book Review), 126 Columbia Law Review 549 (April 2026) (187 Footnotes) (Full Document).

In 2026, during the second year of the second Trump presidency, many popular accounts have understandably focused on “purges” unfolding within major agencies responsible for protecting the environment, the rights of workers, and the health and openness of financial markets. This Book Review tells another, complementary story, one that highlights the agencies that are thriving--namely, those tasked with enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. When voters went to the polls in 2024, Congress had already devoted more resources to enforcing immigration laws than all other federal law enforcement programs combined. As soon as President Donald Trump returned to office, he redirected even more resources towards the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the cabinet-level agency that oversees the actions of the U.S. Border Patrol and of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Congress then amplified this effort by passing an appropriations bill--the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)--that included a massive influx of funding for these agencies. Understandably, this influx of resources has put many migrant communities and advocates on edge and has generated fear that this funding will exacerbate the most harmful and violent elements of current immigration enforcement policies.

Agents and officials tasked with enforcing immigration laws are sometimes derisively called “foot soldiers,” evoking the use and threat of force under law associated with the military or the police. Many legal and sociolegal scholars have noted the quasi-militarism and culture of violence that animates immigration enforcement. Mostly, though, existing scholarship has developed these insights at a distance, providing limited insights on the trajectory and experience of those who join the ranks of immigration enforcement agencies. Enter Professor Irene I. Vega and her groundbreaking book, Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality, which provides an in-depth examination of why a diverse cross section of Americans become immigration foot soldiers and how they make sense of their job and responsibilities. Agencies engaging in politically divisive work like the Border Patrol and ICE have little to gain by opening their doors to scholars and journalists. As a result, scholars often have to pivot and redesign studies on the fly when best laid plans fail to yield access to bureaucratic institutions. And yet, Professor Vega recounts how she showed up to the Border Patrol sector headquarters near the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona in July 2014, approached a woman sitting behind a “large, thick glass partition,” and offered this casual introduction: “I’m a graduate student, and I want to talk to Border Patrol agents about their job. Is there someone who can help me?” From this modest exchange, Vega gained access to some of the most cloistered agencies in the federal government, interviewing ninety agents engaged in enforcement work within both the Border Patrol and ICE. It is hard to overstate the novelty of this dataset.

The descriptive clarity provided by Bordering on Indifference makes the book necessary reading for all students and scholars of immigration law, especially in an era when enforcement agencies shape so much of immigration policy. The book provides many important insights on the agencies most directly responsible for enforcing immigration policies--about the heavily Latino presence among the agency workforce and the false promise of racial representation as a cure for harmful policies; about how many agents end up in immigration agencies as a “plan B” in life; and about how many border communities resent but also rely on the carceral-like economy. Tellingly, many of Vega’s interviewees remarked on how they don’t often encounter the dangerous “criminal aliens” nested within transnational organizations that they were trained to target and combat. Instead, they note that much of the job involves encounters with mere “economic” migrants or asylum seekers, an almost universally compliant and nonthreatening population. These qualitative insights largely track, and provide much needed texture to, the quantitative trends that emerged during the same time period.

Beyond its nuanced account of immigration agencies as viable employment options for racially marginalized and minoritized communities, Bordering on Indifference also provides important insights on the relationship between bureaucracies and violence, and more specifically, on how bureaucratic norms and practices obfuscate agency violence. Like many public officials empowered to use force and engaged in “dirty work”--work that is both “denounced and respected”--immigration enforcement agents and officers find ways to “construct a positive professional identity.” In Vega’s account, these foot soldiers employ a range of strategies to reduce the stigma of working for these agencies, including assuming the worst about otherwise seemingly nonthreatening migrants, taking steps to be “caring” in apprehending and detaining migrants, and embracing an attitude of “disinterested professionalism” which prioritizes systemic norms of neutrality over the equities of any individual case. All of these strategies aim to reduce stigma, legitimate broadly punitive immigration policies, and denigrate the targets of these regulatory efforts.

As a study of bureaucratic governance, Bordering on Indifference frequently compares federal immigration enforcement actors to the police, who are the most obvious government actors at the local level empowered to use and threaten force. In advancing her argument that ICE and the Border Patrol ought to be understood in bureaucratic terms, Vega interrogates the nominal commitments of administrative law--for example, making decisions based on technical expertise, an ostensible commitment to rationality, and a concern with legitimacy in the public’s eye--and shows how these sturdy values quietly reinscribe racial identity and racialized harms. For this reason, framing the Border Patrol and ICE as federal agencies plagued by the same sorts of bureaucratic pathologies associated with the local police makes complete sense. It makes all the more sense when considering the degree to which federal immigration law relies on local criminal law officials. In this way, Bordering on Indifference illustrates how bureaucratic rules and practices make it hard to identify and remedy racialized harms caused by law enforcement actors from the federal government all the way down. But this undersells what the book can teach us about bureaucratic governance. ICE and Border Patrol officers work within a broader federal ecosystem of agencies all charged with different immigration-related duties, many of which have nothing to do with the use or threat of force (such as visa adjudications or labor certifications). For this reason, this Book Review focuses less on what Vega’s book can teach us about what ICE officers and Border Patrol agents have in common with police officers but rather what we can learn about how immigration law’s foot soldiers relate to and affect other parts of the federal immigration bureaucracy.

While some agencies, like the Border Patrol and ICE, use or threaten force in administering immigration laws, other agency actors like U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers, immigration judges, and consular officers engage in bureaucratic work such as reviewing paperwork, conducting interviews, granting visas, and adjudicating waiver applications far from the field or the streets. Roughly speaking, these two ends of the spectrum of agency power--which I have elsewhere described in terms of direct and administrative forms of violence22--operate along pathways either committed to enforcing immigration laws or allocating immigration benefits. On the enforcement side, agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol are tasked with arresting, detaining, and removing migrants. On the benefits side, USCIS and other agencies, consulate offices, and, to a certain extent, immigration judges adjudicate applications for relief. The efforts by ICE officers and Border Patrol agents to achieve legitimacy through their unrelenting enforcement of immigration laws destabilizes the other agencies focused on allocating benefits. The threat of deportation exerts a gravitational force on other immigration agencies, putting them in the position of withdrawing and pulling away as lines demarcating authority get blurred or disappear. Managing migration challenges through enforcement policies not only leads to punitive and often demeaning regulatory outcomes, it also undermines other parts of the administrative state charged with addressing migration in different ways.

This dynamic has only worsened during President Trump’s second Administration. Since 9/11, foot soldiers and bureaucrats have operated within their respective spheres in carrying out their immigration duties, but this commitment to separation of functions has mostly disappeared. Agents who work on the benefits side of the enforcement-benefits distinction are increasingly tasked with enforcement-oriented duties. DHS, for example, has empowered USCIS to issue Notice-to-Appear documents (NTAs), which are the immigration enforcement equivalent to a charging document or indictment issued by prosecutors in the criminal context. Indeed, this Administration’s approach seems to be aimed at removing any hurdles to reassignment and redirecting other agency actors to support enforcement efforts, including (for example) tasking military lawyers to serve as immigration judges at the border. Within the broader immigration bureaucracy, foot soldiers are the paradigmatic immigration actor exerting outsized influence over immigration policy.

Part I summarizes the core, sociological contribution of Vega’s book, which is its focus on how immigration enforcement officers exercise far-reaching legal and punitive authority against a vulnerable population that does not appear to be dangerous or deserving of such punishment. Because existing laws fail to satisfactorily address agent and officer concerns about the legitimacy of their actions, Vega describes the moral economies in which these actors grapple with and attempt to justify their power. Part II focuses on a set of insights that are less expressly developed but nevertheless animate much of the book, namely the mismatch or misalignment that immigration officers see between their training and the day-to-day realities of their jobs. While these agency actors were recruited, trained, and acculturated to focus on dangerous, transnational criminals, the reality has been that many of the migrants they encounter in the field often resemble economic migrants who pose no obvious danger. This misalignment motif, which appears throughout the book, clarifies how the broader immigration system makes it hard--if not impossible--to meaningfully use enforcement policies to achieve just or humane enforcement outcomes.

Part III then considers how Vega’s account broadens understandings about the meaning and reach of bureaucratic governance strategies that rely on the threat and use of force. Concerned by the absence of legal constraints on agency violence, critics of immigration enforcement often argue that such actions are lawful but illegitimate acts. The various strategies utilized by the interviewees in Vega’s book ultimately legitimate punitive enforcement policies by denigrating migrants. At the same time, these enforcement policies and the violence for which they are responsible exert a gravitational force over the rest of the immigration bureaucracy, distorting and arguably corrupting other agency missions. Finally, Part IV considers how the agency dynamics highlighted in Bordering on Indifference can yield insights on immigration enforcement under the second Trump Administration.

[ . . . ]

More than two decades ago, Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin drew attention to the role that immigration cases during the era of Chinese Exclusion played in the expansion of the administrative state and the development of administrative law doctrine. As courts grappled with defining the outer boundaries of government power during the Progressive Era, they attempted to set limits on whether the government could admit and deport migrants during a racially exclusionary era. Chin noted that administrative law, which is “often wrongly considered a technical and obscure discipline, was shaped in part by America’s struggle with race.” A similar story could be told about the post-9/11 era and the fights over executive power to enforce immigration law through its discretionary authority.

Vega’s book obviously has political salience and offers a set of critiques that could be deployed against the Trump Administration and those pushing far-reaching immigration enforcement policies among the political Right. Bordering on Indifference illustrates the costs of empowering foot soldiers to manage a mostly non-threatening and compliant population of migrants with only a narrow skill set grounded in the use of force. But this book can also challenge the political Left to abandon uncritically broad definitions of agency expertise and to articulate a more precise justification for agency power. For decades, the political Left has relied on an uneasy coalition of interest groups that pushed arguments emphasizing deference to agency experts who can lead with facts, science, and fidelity to the laws tasking them with solving major social problems. But this vision of technocratic leadership and problem solving cannot easily account for the agencies charged with administering immigration laws. Some of this vision has to do with limited understandings of how immigration enforcement agencies work on the inside, which is a part of what makes Bordering on Indifference such a critical contribution. Until now, the public has caught only glimpses of life as an immigration enforcement agent, mostly through FOIA requests or interviews with the political appointees who supervise immigration bureaucrats. For this reason, Bordering on Indifference sheds important light on the machinery of our immigration system.

The book also has much to say about the machinery of government more generally. As alluded to earlier, most debates about the administrative state focus on the experiences of bureaucrats working within agencies that regulate the environment or financial markets. Bordering on Indifference gives us a chance to evaluate administrative law from a different vantage point. Unlike the EPA, the SEC, and other agencies familiar to administrative law scholars, immigration agencies do not typically govern through rulemaking or other regulatory strategies that invite public participation. Instead, the Border Patrol and ICE lean on more invasive and aggressive tools like surveillance, apprehension, detention, and of course removal--all of which advance a morally ambiguous regulatory project. Bordering on Indifference helps us better understand how immigration agents make sense of these policies, which in turn helps us better assess the legitimacy of the agencies that enforce them. Bordering on Indifference highlights the relatively weak foundation upon which any arguments about legitimacy might be grounded. Vega notes the lack of specialized training required to carry out significant immigration duties. She also highlights the mismatch that agents experience between their training-- which emphasizes a paramilitary-type boot camp focused on dangerous drug traffickers--and the day-to-day realities of enforcing immigration laws--which involves humanitarian duties like accounting for those seeking asylum amid dangerous conditions in the desert. Vega masterfully shows how these structural factors strain accounts of agency legitimacy, but, in addition, she details the ways that agents themselves attempt to graft a sense of legitimacy onto the job. In sum, the book highlights the relatively weak foundation upon which any arguments about the legitimacy of ICE and the Border Patrol might be established. Most surprising of all, Bordering on Indifference intimates that among those we might find questioning the legitimacy of the current immigration system are immigration law’s foot soldiers themselves.

Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine.