In her new book, Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality, UC Irvine sociologist Irene Vega tells the story of how U.S. Border Patrol Agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers come into the work, how they are trained and socialized once on the job, and how that training and socialization impacts the way they reconcile its many moral and racial tensions. Below, she shares what spurred her research and its contributions to the conversation of racial representation in bureaucracies.
Your work examines how immigration agents rationalize their roles within a system that produces racial and economic inequalities. What initially drew you to this topic, and what research did you do?
Irene Vega: I grew up in a border town in an era of dramatic investments in U.S. border enforcement. The ramping up of border infrastructure was something I observed first-hand. My family and I lived a binational existence, we crossed back and forth from the U.S. to Mexico multiple times a week for mundane things, like shopping and entertainment or to see the doctor or dentist in Mexico where costs were lower. Growing up in this environment meant that immigration agentsâlike the ones I studied in Bordering on Indifferenceâwere familiar to me. They were the people who I directed my âU.S. Citizenâ to at the port of entry, they were the uniformed agents that were ubiquitous at the local gas stations, and there were a couple agents that my family was acquainted with through work or mutual friends.
This experience is the backdrop to my interest in immigration enforcementâa state practice that has dire and disproportionate impacts on Latina/o communities throughout the United States and that can also be a coveted source of employment in border towns throughout the Southwest. Bordering on Indifference elaborates on the paradoxical combinations of social control and mobility that the immigration state creates in border towns like the one I grew up in.
Over the course of two years, I interviewed ninety immigration enforcement agentsâboth 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. Bordering on Indifference tells the story of how these agents come into the work, how they are trained and socialized once on the job, and how that training and socialization impacts the way they reconcile its many moral and racial tensions. I draw contrasts and highlight similarities between Latina/o agents and their non-Latina/o peers, but the former are my main interlocutors because these agents wield the stateâs coercive power but are also members of the racial/ethnic group that is disproportionately targeted by that power.
Many of the agents you interviewed are Mexican American. How does their racial and cultural background shape their perspectives on immigration enforcement, and how do they reconcile their work with their own identities?
IV: Latina/o agents deal with layered legitimacy deficits, those that inhere to the profession but also those that occur at the intersection of their race/ethnicity and professional role. This in-betweenness forces them to contend with the moral and racialized character of their work much more consistently and explicitly than agents of other backgrounds. Latina/o agents tended to be more pragmatic and less ideological about their work, both in describing their motivations for entering the profession, and in how they talked about immigrants once on the job. They remained more self-conscious about their job than other agents and conceded to the moral ambiguities of immigration control more readily.
Yet, in the end these are distinctions without a difference. The Latina/os I interviewed are implementing the same racialized policies their colleagues are. They are not dissenting or reforming the immigration system, but are lending the system the legitimacy that comes from having a representative policing workforce
You describe âindifferenceâ as a bureaucratic resource that helps agents manage the moral complexities of their job. Can you elaborate on how this indifference is cultivated and reinforced within immigration enforcement agencies?
IV: Even though readers will meet many agents throughout this book, Bordering on Indifference is not really about agents as individuals, nor is it only about the tensions they grapple with. This book is about the normative principles that pervade agentsâ work, it is about the normalization of exclusion, and ultimately about the production of indifference in institutions like the U.S. immigration system. Indifference, which is at its core about 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.
Your research sheds light on the ways that minoritized bureaucrats contribute to the legitimacy of the immigration system. What are the broader implications of this for our understanding of race, labor, and state power?
IV: The Latinization of the immigration control bureaucracy has been facilitated by the massive growth of the U.S. enforcement apparatus, which has become more restrictive and criminalized over time. When Latinas/os go to work for the Border Patrol and ICE, no matter their initial motivations, they come to embody state power and articulate ideas that reflect immigration agenciesâ ideological positions. Latina/o immigration agents have thus implemented many of the border control and deportation policies that have had devastating impacts on Latinas/os in and outside of the United States.
The conclusion that Latina/o agents, regardless of their intentions or how they understand their work, do not disrupt the immigration systemâs status quo is predictable for those who understand that policing is an inherently racialized form of state power. However, it is important to remember that among large segments of the public, racism is understood as either a thing of the past, hidden under colorblind ideologies, or thought as the disgrace of individual bad actors, instead of something that is embedded in laws, policies, and institutions. This way of thinking about racismâas an individual problem of bad applesâthwarts the structural analyses necessary to understand why policing systems continue to churn out the same exclusionary outcomes, mostly independent of what their workforces looks like.
The immigration system is a cautionary tale for those who uncritically conflate institutional diversity with organizational change in policing. My findings remind us that bureaucratic culture can thwart group commitments, constraining bureaucratsâ individual agency through rules and regulations, as well as through racialized sanctions. Bordering on Indifference contributes to the conversation of racial representation in bureaucracies through a case study that shows how diversity and repression can co-exist in policing.
What do you hope readers take away from Bordering on Indifferenceâespecially those who may not have considered the moral and racial dynamics of immigration enforcement before?
IV: The main takeaway of Bordering on Indifference is that 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.
I want to be clear that the Border Patrol and ICE are not somehow experts at collecting unethical people that are eager to abuse, exclude, and discriminate. In fact, the federal government need not select people with ill intentions to produce ill outcomes. What the federal government needs to do, and what it does, is recruit people and train them to believe that they are on the right side of a series of debates about law, race, and morality that come with the job. Bordering on Indifference shows how that process happens, centering the experiences of Latina/o agents for whom those normative issues are least avoidable.
Some parts of this content are excerpted from Vega, Irene I. 2025. Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality. 91ÌÒÉ«.
Attend Vegaâs 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. .
About the Author
Irene I. Vega is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.