International Refugee Assistance Project et al v. Trump et al

Filing 118

MOTION for Leave to File Amici Curiae Brief in support of Plaintiffs' Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order by Kelly Lyttle Hernandez(Shebaya, Sirine)

Case 8:17-cv-00361-TDC Document 118 Filed 03/13/17 Page 1 of 21

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND
SOUTHERN DIVISION
INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE
ASSISTANCE PROJECT, et al.,
Civil Action No: 8:17-CV-00361-TDC
Plaintiffs,
v.
DONALD J. TRUMP, et al.,
Defendants.

HISTORY PROFESSORS AND SCHOLARS’ MOTION FOR LEAVE TO FILE
AMICI CURIAE BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION
FOR A TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER
Amici curiae respectfully move the Court for leave to file a brief in support of Plaintiffs’
Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order. A copy of the proposed brief is attached as Exhibit
A to this motion. Plaintiffs have consented to the filing of the attached brief. Defendants were
asked for their position on the filing of this motion and the attached amicus brief, but they had
not provided a response by the time of the filing of this motion.
I.

Amici Curiae
Amici are professors who are experts in U.S. and world history. They have identified

troubling parallels between the criminal reporting requirements in Section 11 of Executive Order
13780 and similar actions that have been taken in the past to stigmatize targeted populations, and
wish to bring them to the Court’s attention.

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Amici are the following: 1
Professor Alicia Schmidt Camacho
Professor Crystal N. Feimster
Professor David Scott Fitzgerald
Professor Estelle B. Freedman
Professor Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Professor Matthew Frye Jacobson
Professor Karl Jacoby
Professor Benjamin H. Johnson
Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Professor Mae M. Ngai
Professor A. Naomi Paik
Professor Stephen Pitti
Professor Todd Presner
Professor Geoffrey Robinson
Professor Elliott Young
II.

Amici Should Be Permitted to Submit Their Brief
Amici’s brief focuses on the criminal reporting requirements in Section 11 of the

Executive Order. Amici offer concrete examples of past experience with race- or national originbased criminal reporting and criminal associations like those in Section 11, to illustrate that such
measures both cause discriminatory effect and are motivated by discriminatory animus. For
these reasons, amici respectfully request that the Court grant this motion for leave to file the
attached brief.
DATED: March 13, 2017

By:

/s/ Sirine Shebaya
Sirine Shebaya

Sirine Shebaya (Bar No. 07191)
Civil Rights and Immigration Attorney
P.O. Box 42219
Washington, DC 20015
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Amici are acting on their own behalf and not on behalf of any organizations with which they are
associated. No party’s counsel authored the brief in whole or in part, and no person other than
counsel for amici contributed money that was intended to fund preparing or submitting this brief.
2
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Katherine Huang*
Carlos Singer*
HUANG YBARRA SINGER & MAY LLP
550 South Hope Street, Suite 1850
Los Angeles, CA 90071
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
[e-mail]
*Admission pro hac vice pending

Counsel for Amici Curiae

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Exhibit A
Proposed Amicus Brief by History Professors and Scholars

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IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND
SOUTHERN DIVISION
INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE
ASSISTANCE PROJECT, et al.,
Civil Action No: 8:17-CV-00361-TDC
Plaintiffs,
v.
DONALD J. TRUMP, et al.,
Defendants.

HISTORY PROFESSORS AND SCHOLARS’ AMICI CURIAE BRIEF
IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION
FOR A TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER

Sirine Shebaya (Bar No. 07191)
Civil Rights and Immigration Attorney
P.O. Box 42219
Washington, DC 20015
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

Katherine Huang*
Carlos Singer*
HUANG YBARRA SINGER & MAY LLP
550 South Hope Street, Suite 1850
Los Angeles, CA 90071
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
[e-mail]
*Admission pro hac vice pending

Counsel for Amici Curiae

1

Case 8:17-cv-00361-TDC Document 118 Filed 03/13/17 Page 6 of 21

TABLE OF CONTENTS
STATEMENT OF INTEREST ..............................................................................................1
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................1
ARGUMENT ........................................................................................................................3
I.

NAZI GERMANY………………………………………………………….3

II.

THE UNITED STATES’ PAST USES OF RACE- AND………………….4
NATIONAL ORIGIN-BASED CRIME REPORTING
TO EXCLUDE PARTICULAR IMMIGRANTS
A. Use of Criminal Association to Exclude Italian Immigrants ....................5
B. Use of Criminal Association to Exclude Chinese Immigrants ..................7
C. Immigrants Portrayed as Sexual Threats to U.S. Citizens ........................8

III.

STEREOTYPING OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN AS RAPISTS ..........9

CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................11

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STATEMENT OF INTEREST
Amici are professors who are experts in U.S. and world history. 1 They are compelled to
submit this brief because of the troubling parallels between the criminal reporting requirements
in Section 11 of Executive Order 13780 and similar actions that have been taken in the past to
stigmatize targeted populations, advance widespread inequities, and stir up hatred and violence.
Amici offer concrete examples of actual experience with race- or national origin-based criminal
reporting like that in Section 11, to illustrate that such measures both cause discriminatory effect
and are motivated by discriminatory animus, and thus are precisely the types of invidious actions
that the United States Constitution is meant to guard against.
INTRODUCTION
Throughout modern history, criminal reporting targeting particular groups have been
used to demonize those groups and incite bigotry. Section 11 of Executive Order 13780 sets up
just this type of hate-mongering. It directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to collect and
make publicly available every 180 days the following information: (i) the number of foreign
nationals who have been charged with, convicted of, or removed from this country based on
terrorism-related activity; (ii) the number of foreign nationals who have “been radicalized” and
engaged in “terrorism-related acts;” (iii) the number and types of acts of “gender-based violence
against women, including so-called ‘honor killings,’ in the United States by foreign nationals,”
and (iv) any other information “relevant to public safety and security…including information on
the immigration status of foreign nationals charged with major offenses.” These provisions
follow on the heels of another Executive Order that requires the Secretary of Homeland Security
to, “on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by
1

Amici are identified in Attachment 1.
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aliens.” Executive Order 13768 of January 25, 2017, Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of
the United States, 82 Fed. Reg. 18, at § 9(b).
The Court need go no farther than the plain language of Section 11 to find discrimination.
The criminal reporting requirements apply to only one class of people: “foreign nationals.”
Moreover, Section 11 singles out “honor killings,” which are often associated with Islam and
mistakenly believed to be a common, accepted ritual in Muslim communities. The Court
undoubtedly also is aware of evidence of the Executive Branch’s comments equating immigrants
and Muslims with criminals despite facts -- scientific and empirical evidence -- establishing that
immigrants and Muslims do not, in fact, commit more crime or inflict more violence on women
than non-Muslim individuals born on U.S. soil.
This amicus brief does not repeat these arguments, but instead provides historical
context for Section 11’s criminal reporting requirements. From Nazi Germany to the postReconstruction American South to the exclusionary laws passed in the early twentieth century,
historical studies have shown that crime reporting that disproportionately focuses on members of
a social or political minority has routinely been used as a tool of mass stigmatization and
criminalization, anchoring disparate human outcomes including nation-based exclusion from the
United States. In some instances, the association of a particular community with criminality, and
the reinforcement of that association in the public mind through official government action and
rhetoric, have led to widespread state and vigilante violence against members of the identified
group.
In this case, the targeted group consists of “foreign nationals.” As the Supreme Court
recognizes, race, alienage, and national origin are “so seldom relevant to the achievement of any
legitimate state interest that laws grounded in such considerations are deemed to reflect prejudice
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and antipathy--a view that those in the burdened class are not as worthy or deserving as others.”
City of Cleburne, Tex. V. Cleburne Living Center, 473 U.S. 432, 440 (1985). History has borne
this out, demonstrating that laws and actions like Section 11 of the Executive Order serve no
purpose but to brand people as criminals based solely on race or national origin. As such,
Section 11 violates the bedrock principles of equal protection in the United States Constitution.2
ARGUMENT
While the reporting requirements in Section 11 of the Executive Order do not map
squarely onto similar policies that have been imposed in the past, they do share one key element:
the targeted association of a particular minority population with criminality. The historical
examples discussed below demonstrate that equating groups with criminals is aimed at
marginalizing, excluding, and suppressing the targeted groups, and do in fact cause severe
dignitary harm to them.
I.

NAZI GERMANY
In Nazi Germany, Jews (and other minority groups) were subject to targeted and

disproportionate charges of criminality that quickly led to the mass stigmatization of those
groups, the deprivation of rights and citizenship, and, finally, outright deportation and mass
murder in concentration and death camps.
The equation of Jews with criminality, which has a long European history, was a
pervasive and recurrent part of Nazi rhetoric and policy. In the Nazi weekly Der Stürmer, for
See, e.g., City of Cleburne, Tex. v. Cleburne Living Center, 473 U.S. 432, 440 (1985) (laws that
classify people by race, alienage, or national origin are constitutional only if they are narrowed
tailored to further a compelling state interest); Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 373-74 (1886)
(laws violate equal protection principles if they are administered in a discriminatory fashion);
Village of Arlington Heights v. Metro. Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U.S. 252, 264-65 (1977)
(facially neutral law with a discriminatory effect violates equal protection if a discriminatory
intent or purpose was a motivating factor for the law).
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example, Jews were consistently portrayed as “born criminals” who undermined the well-being
of Germany and defiled the German race. While Der Stürmer often featured pictures of
individual Jews accused of crimes (along with their names and addresses), it primarily portrayed
Jews as a group to be guilty of murder, degeneracy, sexual perversion, fraud, and rape.
Throughout the 1930s and early 40s, Nazi organizations and government-supported
research institutes undertook countless “criminological studies” to articulate what they
considered to be the fundamental linkage between Jewishness and hereditary criminality.3
State-supported organizations such as the Institute for History of the New Germany and its
affiliated Research Department for the Jewish Question, the Nazi Party Institute for Research on
the Jewish Question, and the Reich Security Main Office, published statistics, anthropological
studies, and research reporting on alleged “Jewish criminality.” Seizing on data purportedly
demonstrating the inherency of criminality in Jews as a race, State authorities accused Jews of
causing moral and spiritual degeneracy, defiling the German race, and weakening the German
nation. This directly paved the way for more radical measures to exclude Jews from the
political, social, economic, and cultural life of Germany, and ultimately to the systematic
rounding-up, deportation, and annihilation of Jews.
II.

THE UNITED STATES’ PAST USES OF RACE- AND NATIONAL ORIGINBASED CRIME REPORTING TO EXCLUDE PARTICULAR IMMIGRANTS
The United States has its own shameful history of using crime statistics and mass

criminalization to justify excluding immigrants and to incite hatred, even violence, against
Robert G. Waite, “’Judentum und Kriminalität’ – Rassistische Deutungen in kriminologischen
Publikationen 1933-1945,” in: Rassismus, Faschismus, Antifaschismus, eds. Manfred
Weissbecker and Reinhard Kühnl (Papy Rossa Verlag, 2000), 46-62; Michael Berkowitz, The
Crime of my Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (University of
California Press, 2007); Alan Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi
Germany (Harvard University Press, 2006).
4
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targeted groups. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Anglo-American
Protestant elite fueled crime scares associated with “criminal aliens” from particular European
nations and constructed the image of opium-addicted deviants from China. One writer opined
that the “overwhelming influx from south Europe” would “change our type of crime—murder,
rape and sex immorality will become more common than the Anglo-American crimes of
burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy.” Nativists manipulated crime statistics to justify their
xenophobic policies, resulting in the passages of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration
Act of 1924.
A.

Use of Criminal Association to Exclude Italian Immigrants

The treatment of immigrants from Italy provides one example of how criminalization has
been used as an exclusionary tactic. From the onset of large-scale Italian immigration in the late
nineteenth century, newspapers and government reports routinely slurred Italians as criminals.
An 1891 editorial in The New York Times praised the lynchings of six Italians for eliminating
“sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have
transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound
societies of their native country,” who were “to us a pest without mitigations.” Writing in the
North American Review in 1908, New York’s police chief singled out Italians – particularly
“medieval criminals” from Southern Italy – and lamented that “our streets are overrun with
foreign prostitutes, and foreign anarchists openly advocate murder and arson in our slums.”
A joint House-Senate congressional commission known as the Dillingham Commission
published a series of reports between 1907 and 1910 that further stigmatized Italians as
criminals. Some of the reports drew on arrest and incarceration reports to argue that Italians
were disproportionately likely to commit violent crimes. Other reports asserted that Southern
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Italians or Italians were “regarded by many as racially undesirable” because of “their ignorance,
low standards of living, and the supposedly great criminal tendencies among them.”
Accepting the view of “the not unfounded belief that certain kinds of criminality are
inherent in the Italian race,” the Dillingham Commission recommended reducing immigration
from Italy and other countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a
member of the public Dillingham Commission and of the private Immigration Restriction
League, promoted a literacy test for immigrants knowing it would “bear most heavily upon the
Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics, and very light, or not at all upon
English- speaking emigrants or Germans, Scandinavians, and French.” After the literacy bill
was passed in 1917, immigration from Italy fell from 283,738 in 1914 to 95,145 in 1920.
To further reduce Southern European immigration while allowing entry to large numbers
from northern and western Europe, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was passed to restrict the
annual number of immigrants admitted from any country to three percent of the number of
residents from that same country living in the United States in the 1910 census. This, in effect,
permitted “old-stock” immigration from northern and western Europe at the prewar level, while
cutting immigration from “new-stock” southern and eastern Europe to a fifth of its prewar level.
The Immigration Act of 1924 heightened the preference for “old-stock” European
immigrants by rolling back the base year for calculating the quotas from 1910 to 1890. The 1924
act established an annual maximum quota for each nationality that would be two percent of the
total population of that nationality as recorded in the 1890 census, with a minimum quota of 100.
In practice, that meant that the share of the quotas reserved for southern and eastern Europeans
fell from 45 to 16 percent. The House committee report adopting the 1890 baseline
acknowledged that its goal was to reduce the flow of “races from southern and eastern Europe.”
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In the case of Italians, the annual quotas were reduced from 42,057 in 1921 to 3,845 in 1924. It
was not until 1965 that Congress ended the national origins quota system.4
B.

Use of Criminal Association to Exclude Chinese Immigrants

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, journalists reported that opium
threatened American society because it made users insane, promiscuous, and nonproductive. As
the Reno Evening Gazette put it in February 1879, opium addiction was a “foul blot on society –
a hideous, loathsome moral leprosy, paralyzing the mind and wrecking the body. It is a foul
cancer, eating the vitals of society and destroying all who are drawn within its horrible spell.”
Although British immigrants and Anglo-Americans were active members of the opium
trade, the press nearly exclusively reported Chinese immigrants as the purveyors of opium within
the United States. According to one story, Chinese immigrants were “directly responsible for
this blighting vice. They imported and introduced the curse, and at their door must it be laid with
a thousand other moral sins.” When cities and states began passing anti-opium laws during the
1870s, such reporting disproportionately cast Chinese immigrants as a criminal class even
though in actuality, very few Chinese immigrants were involved in the opium trade.
With this disproportionate focus on the Chinese as opium dealers, anti-opium campaigns
were inevitably swept into a broader anti-Chinese movement. In 1882, Congress passed the
Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States for
ten years. It was extended in 1892 and made permanent in 1902.
The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the laws that followed, marked a pivotal
turning point in U.S. history. Never before had a national group been banned from entry at U.S.
For more information, see: FitzGerald, David and David Cook-Martín. Culling the Masses: The
Democratic Roots of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard University Press,
2014); and Alba, Richard. Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Prentice Hall, 1985).
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borders, and it not only excluded immigrants at the borders, but it also assaulted the dignity of
Chinese Americans already living within the United States and subjected them to increased state
surveillance. The Chinese exclusion laws also set the foundation for a series of immigration
bans that, by 1924, expanded into a system of total Asian exclusion from the United States.
The disproportionate reporting of Chinese immigrants as criminals thus buoyed the mass
stigmatization of Chinese immigrants and cast them, as well as other Asian groups, as
categorically unwelcome in the United States.5
C.

Immigrants Portrayed as Sexual Threats to U.S. Citizens

The stereotyping of immigrants from certain countries as sexual threats further fueled the
hostility to the “new immigrants.” At first, the demonization of immigrants as sexually immoral
focused on prostitution. One of the earliest immigration restriction laws, the Page Act of 1875,
attempted to limit the importation of women for “the purposes of prostitution.” Particularly
directed at Chinese women, it helped pave the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In the 1920s, male Filipino laborers became associated with endangering white women
and police in some cities were authorized to arrest Filipinos seen with white women. The vice
investigations conducted in most major cities in the early twentieth century included exposés of
southern European men depicted as procurers or pimps and of young female Jewish “sex
delinquents” arrested for prostitution.
While concerns about the immorality of immigrants typically identified the risks to young
women, they also alluded to same-sex relations. A California physician wrote that sexually-

For more information, see: Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the
Exclusion Era, 1882 – 1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Diana L. Ahmad, The
Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West
(University of Nevada Press, 2007).
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transmitted diseases were once rare, but “since the influx of foreigners from those countries
where unnatural practices are common, more cases are now seen.” On the West Coast, nativists
warned that the Chinese would bring “paganism, incest, sodomy” to America. Authorities
became particularly alarmed about “immoral boys who pander to the passions of vicious
Greeks.” Although Greek immigrants represented less than one percent of the male population
of Portland, Oregon at the turn of the twentieth century, they appeared in over eleven percent of
the arrests in that city during a 1912 sex scandal over homosexuality.6
II.

STEREOTYPING OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN AS RAPISTS
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, governmental authorities in the

American South used rape charges to demonize, disenfranchise, and terrorize African
Americans. Southern politicians found that rape fears could be an extremely useful tool for
disenfranchising African American men, who had gained the vote in 1870 with the ratification of
the Fifteenth Amendment. Arguing that the political authority of black men would lead to sexual
access to white women, white politicians fomented fears of black lust while supporting the
practice of vigilante lynching in the name of defending white womanhood.
The press further encouraged the association between black men and rape. The Arkansas

For more information, see: Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans and
Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882 (University of Illinois Press, 2003); Rick Baldoz,
The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York
University Press, 2011); Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (University of
California Press, 2012); Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice
Activism, 1887-1917 (University of Illinois Press, 2006); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a
Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press,
1998); Vivien M. L. Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida's Pardon Board and
the Penal System in the Progressive Era (University Press of Florida, 2000); Mae Ngai,
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University
Press, 2005); and, Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of
Homosexuality in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2000).
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Gazette rarely reported rapes by black men before the 1860s, but after black enfranchisement, the
paper begin to reprint reports from other papers about black men assaulting white women. In the
North, The New York Times described rape as “a crime to which negroes are particularly prone,"
while the National Police Gazette repeatedly used the phrase “The Negro Crime” to headline
accounts of the rape of white women. The paper identified rape as a “characteristic crime” of
black men and then used this view to justify vigilantism.
Depicting African Americans as natural rapists allowed southerners to maintain that
blacks were incapable of the self-control and morality required for citizenship. This
exclusionary construction in turn justified the disenfranchisement of black male voters, achieved
through literacy tests, poll taxes, and all-white primary elections. Southern politicians also
exploited sexual fears to justify racial segregation. One argument for separating the races on
public transportation was that the proximity in railway cars and other modes of transport
provided opportunities for sexual contact between black men and white women.
The most deadly effect of the demonization of black men as rapists was the epidemic of
lynching. By the 1890s, the practice of replacing court trials with mob violence came to be
associated primarily with the intimidation of former slaves and the charge of rape. Between
1882 and 1929, mobs seized over 3,000 African Americans who had been accused or convicted
of a crime, ranging from insolence to consensual interracial sex to murder. By framing their
terrorist acts as a defense of female purity --“lynching as the remedy for rape,” as one southern
columnist wrote -- white supremacists effectively immobilized much of the opposition to the
mob. In sum, the association of rape as “The Negro Crime” was used to justify the murder and

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political intimidation of newly enfranchised black men.7
CONCLUSION
Historical studies illustrate that those in political power motivated by discriminatory
intent often wield mass criminalization as a tool for excluding targeted groups. Historical
examples caution us that Section 11’s disproportionate focus on crimes allegedly committed by
“foreign nationals” and Muslims -- and the resulting (and intended) association of such groups
with criminality -- is and will be just as damaging as past criminalization policies based on race
or national origin.
DATED: March 13, 2017

By:

/s/ Sirine Shebaya
Sirine Shebaya

Sirine Shebaya (Bar No. 07191)
Civil Rights and Immigration Attorney
P.O. Box 42219
Washington, DC 20015
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Katherine Huang*
Carlos Singer*
HUANG YBARRA SINGER & MAY LLP
550 South Hope Street, Suite 1850
Los Angeles, CA 90071
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
[e-mail]
*Admission pro hac vice pending

Counsel for Amici Curiae

For more information, see Estelle Freeman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of
Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press, 2013).
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Attachment 1
This brief was submitted by the following amici:
Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and
Migration at Yale University, and serves as Associate Head of Ezra Stiles College. She is the
author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US-Mexico Borderlands (NYU
Press, 2008), winner of the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize, and articles
about gender violence, migration, labor, and human rights in the Mexico-U.S. border region. Her
current book project, The Carceral Border, examines the effects of social violence
and militarized immigration enforcement on the North American migratory circuit.
Crystal N. Feimster, is an associate professor in the Department of African American
Studies, the American Studies Program and History Department at Yale University, where she
teaches a range of courses in 19th and 20th century African American history, women’s history,
and southern history. Her manuscript, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and
Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2009), examines the roles of both black and white women
in the politics of racial and sexual violence in the American South. She is currently working on
two book projects: Sexual Warfare: Rape and the American Civil War and Mutiny at Fort
Jackson: A Case Study of Wartime Freedom.
David Scott FitzGerald is Theodore E. Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations,
Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at
the University of California, San Diego. He is co-author of Culling the Masses: The Democratic
Roots of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2014), which
won best book awards from the American Political Science Association’s Migration and
Citizenship Section, American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Political Sociology Section,
and ASA International Migration Section. He is also the author of A Nation of Emigrants: How
Mexico Manages its Migration (University of California Press, 2009) and Negotiating ExtraTerritorial Citizenship (Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, 2000), and co-editor of six
books on Mexico-U.S. migration.
Estelle B. Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford
University. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, she has written ten books on the history of
women, sexuality, and feminism, including No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the
Future of Women (Ballantine 2002); The Essential Feminist Reader (Modern Library, 2007);
Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics (University of North Carolina, 2006); and Redefining Rape:
Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (2013). She is the co-author (with John
D’Emilio) of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (University of Chicago Press,
3d ed., 2012) and has also written two award-winning books on the history of women's prison
reform.
Glenda E. Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, African
American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. She earned her PhD at the
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her most recent book, co-authored with Tom
Sugrue and published by W. W. Norton, is These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to
the Present. Her current book project is Bearden’s Collage: The Saga of an African American
Family from Slavery to Civil Rights. She is the author of Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the
Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1898-1920 and Defying Dixie: The Radical
Roots of Civil Rights, 1920-1950.
Kelly Lytle Hernandez is an associate professor of History and African-American
Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is one of the nation’s leading historians
of race, policing, immigration, and incarceration in the United States. Her award-winning
book, MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010),
explored the making and meaning of the U.S. Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her
forthcoming book, City of Inmates: Conquest and the Rise of Human Caging in Los
Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), discusses the rise of incarceration as a social
institution and its effect on certain populations.
Matthew Frye Jacobson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies
and History at Yale University. He is the author of several books on race in the United States,
including Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2005); Barbarian
Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000);
and Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998). He
is currently at work on his sixth book, Odetta’s Voice and other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era
as Cultural History. His areas of expertise include race in U.S. political culture 1790-present,
immigration and migration, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.
Karl Jacoby is professor of history at Columbia University and a specialist in
environmental, borderlands, and Native American history. His books include Crimes Against
Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation and
Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.
Benjamin H. Johnson teaches in the history department at Loyola University
Chicago. He is co-editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the author
of numerous books and articles, including Revolution in Texas: How A Forgotten Rebellion and
Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (Yale University Press, 2003);
Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (Yale University Press, 2008); and Bridging
National Borders in North America (Duke University Press, 2010).
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His academic work focuses on racial criminalization and
the origins of the carceral state. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race,
Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010), which won
the 2011 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best book in American studies.
Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American
Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship,
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and nationalism. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the
Making of Modern America (2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary
Invention of Chinese America (2010). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the
Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Boston Review.
She is now working on Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908, a study of
Chinese gold miners and racial politics in the nineteenth-century California, the Australian
colony of Victoria, and the South African Transvaal.
A. Naomi Paik is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison
Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016), reads testimonial narratives of subjects rendered
rightless by the U.S. state through their imprisonment in camps. She has published articles in
Social Text, Radical History Review, and Cultural Dynamics, has forthcoming pieces in
Humanity and the edited collection, Guantánamo and the Empire of Freedom, and is developing
a new project on military outsourcing. Her research and teaching interests include comparative
ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies;
transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.
Stephen Pitti is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he
is also the Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational
Migration. His academic scholarship focuses on Latinos in the United States, on immigration and
migration, and on public history. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American
Historians, he is a member of the National Park Service Advisory Board, the Chair of the
National Historic Landmarks Committee, and the author of American Latinos and the Making of
the United States (2012) and The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and
Northern California (2003).
Todd Presner is professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Los Angeles. He is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA
Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and is also the Chair of the Digital Humanities Program.
He is the author or co-author of multiple books, including Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews,
Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics
of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities
(Harvard University Press, 2014), and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, co-edited with
Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (Harvard University Press, 2016).
Geoffrey Robinson is a professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles
where he teaches and writes about political violence, genocide, and human rights, primarily in
Southeast Asia. His books include: The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali
(Cornell University Press, 1995); East Timor 1999: Crimes against Humanity (Elsham & Hak,
2006); and ‘If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die’: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor
(Princeton University Press, 2010). He previously worked at Amnesty International’s Research
Department in London and served as a Political Affairs Officer with the United Nations in Dili,
East Timor. His forthcoming book, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres,
1965-66, will be published by Princeton University Press in late 2017.
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Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department and director of Ethnic Studies at
Lewis and Clark College. His major scholarly publications include Alien Nation: Chinese
Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII (UNC Press, 2014), Catarino
Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border (Duke University Press, 2004), and Continental
Crossroads (Duke University Press, 2004).

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