Deportation as Settler Carcerality

This chapter frames deportation as settler carcerality. Settler power targets the intimate, proliferating gender and sexual violence. The chapter examines the expanded use of the criminal legal system to deport people from the interior of the United States. I argue that ejection through deportation advances settler colonialism. Settling requires evolving legal regimes to maintain territorial and social control over a space animated by Indigenous sovereignty. The chapter bridges critical migration studies and critical Indigenous studies to analyze contemporary mass displacement. I propose four analytical shifts that emerge from reading across the two fields. The author pairs the following concepts, putting them in generative tension: migrancy and Indigeneity, dispossession and deportation, settler power and incarceration, and intimacy and publicity.