This article focuses on the immigration-related demands currently being placed on local police in the United States and the emergence of what we call a “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork” (MJP) of immigration enforcement. We report results from nationwide surveys of city police chiefs and county sheriffs and intensive fieldwork in three jurisdictions. The enforcement landscape we describe is complicated by the varying and overlapping responsibilities of sheriffs and city police, and by the tendency for sheriffs to maintain closer relationships with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the MJP—for immigrants, for their communities, and for the evolving relationship between levels of government in the federal system.

The research project entitled “Local Policing in the Context of Immigration” (LPCI) was active from 2007 through 2016. The purposes of the study were to explore and describe the types of local policies and policing practices that local jurisdictions and police agencies throughout the United States were undertaking with regard to police encounters with immigrants (specifically, unauthorized or undocumented immigrants), and to investigate the characteristics of local communities that were associated with these various approaches to immigration policing as well as the potential consequences of local immigration policing for immigrants, communities, and the nation.

National immigration policy meets the realities of unauthorized immigration at the local level, often in ways undesired by residents, as exemplified by the dramatic rise of local anti-immigrant legislation in U.S. states and municipalities. Scholars have studied why some states and municipalities, but not others, engage in immigration policy making. Such research is not designed, however, to evaluate how the basic structure of U.S. government facilitates and shapes local protest. To probe that issue, we compare Chiapas, Mexico and Arizona, USA, both peripheral areas significantly affected by unauthorized immigration and national policies designed to control it. We find that the open texture of U.S. federalism facilitates local activism, while Mexico's more centralized government does not. Activists within both states are similar, however, in deploying law creatively to critique national policy, a reminder of the growing worldwide significance of legal pluralism and legal consciousness in the politics of protest.