Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Irene Vega, Assistant Professor, UC Irvine | School of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology
The United States Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement or “ICE” are both, notorious and enigmatic. These days, as has long been the case, there is no shortage of news stories about the federal agencies that are charged with border enforcement and the detention and deportation of noncitizens deemed undesirable by the U.S. federal government.
But despite the notoriety of the agencies themselves, most of us know little about the agents that work for the Border Patrol and ICE. We see the outcomes of their work and hear about their mandates in the news—but we don’t know who the agents are, how they came into the work, how they are trained and socialized to do their job. And, perhaps most importantly of all, we know little about how they reconcile the political dimensions, racial inequities, and moral ambiguities of the work.
My book Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality aims to fill that gap.
Over the course of two years, I interviewed immigration enforcement agents—both U.S. Border Patrol Agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers. I spoke to a diverse set of agents, but most of them were Latinas/os, children or grandchildren of Mexican immigrants, many of whom grew up along the U.S.-Mexico border they now policed.
This book elaborates on the paradoxical combinations of social control and mobility that the immigration state creates in border towns throughout the southwest and reveals the normative principles that pervade agents’ work. At it core, my analysis is about the normalization of exclusion, and about the production of indifference in institutions like the U.S. immigration system. Indifference, which we can understand as apathy and detachment, is both a taught bureaucratic strategy that agents use to look away from the most conflicting aspects of their work, as well as a major product of their efforts to cultivate a moral sense of self.
Thinking about indifference is important because it helps us unlock the bureaucratic dimension of immigration control. Immigration enforcement is an inherently coercive form of state power that trades in cruelty but is carried out routinely under the guise of legal and technical rationality.
So as we reflect on immigration today, one question we should be asking ourselves is what is the role of indifference in perpetuating exclusion through our immigration system?
Irene Vega, Assistant Professor, UC Irvine | School of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology
The United States Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement or “ICE” are both, notorious and enigmatic. These days, as has long been the case, there is no shortage of news stories about the federal agencies that are charged with border enforcement and the detention and deportation of noncitizens deemed undesirable by the U.S. federal government.
But despite the notoriety of the agencies themselves, most of us know little about the agents that work for the Border Patrol and ICE. We see the outcomes of their work and hear about their mandates in the news—but we don’t know who the agents are, how they came into the work, how they are trained and socialized to do their job. And, perhaps most importantly of all, we know little about how they reconcile the political dimensions, racial inequities, and moral ambiguities of the work.
My book Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality aims to fill that gap.
Over the course of two years, I interviewed immigration enforcement agents—both U.S. Border Patrol Agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers. I spoke to a diverse set of agents, but most of them were Latinas/os, children or grandchildren of Mexican immigrants, many of whom grew up along the U.S.-Mexico border they now policed.
This book elaborates on the paradoxical combinations of social control and mobility that the immigration state creates in border towns throughout the southwest and reveals the normative principles that pervade agents’ work. At it core, my analysis is about the normalization of exclusion, and about the production of indifference in institutions like the U.S. immigration system. Indifference, which we can understand as apathy and detachment, is both a taught bureaucratic strategy that agents use to look away from the most conflicting aspects of their work, as well as a major product of their efforts to cultivate a moral sense of self.
Thinking about indifference is important because it helps us unlock the bureaucratic dimension of immigration control. Immigration enforcement is an inherently coercive form of state power that trades in cruelty but is carried out routinely under the guise of legal and technical rationality.
So as we reflect on immigration today, one question we should be asking ourselves is what is the role of indifference in perpetuating exclusion through our immigration system?
