"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."

In our latest installment of UCI Experts On, sociologist Irene Vega shares how her new book, Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality, aims to fill that gap.

 

 

• More from Vega in our Faculty Bookshelf Q&A series.
• Attend Vega’s online book launch event hosted online by Border Criminologies at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law on June 2, 9:00 a.m. PDT. Event will feature a live Q&A with the author.