CLS core faculty member Armando Ibarra and affiliate faculty member Sara McKinnon recently shared their thoughts on immigration enforcement with the hosts of WORT community radio’s A Public Affair. On Wednesday, Prof. McKinnon and host Ali Muldrow reviewed the second Trump Administration’s year of mass deportations, noting that the speed and scale of current enforcement efforts and rollbacks of opportunities for legal immigration are unprecedented. McKinnon also linked the campaign to racially motivated fears of immigrants that have gained increasing traction on the U.S. right. On Thursday, Prof. Ibarra suggested to host Alan Ruff that under the current administration, the United States has “stopped pretending not to be an empire,” and that this new foreign policy stance was linked to aggressive immigration enforcement at home Ibarra and Ruff also discussed community mobilizations by the Milwaukee-based immigration advocacy and labor rights organization Voces de la Frontera. Armando Ibarra is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor with the School for Workers and the Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies Program. A political scientist, his research examines social movements and the political economy of working class communities of Latin American descent in the U.S. He has worked extensively with labor unions and grassroots organizations during his academic career. Sara McKinnon is Professor of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture in the Department of Communication Arts, and Faculty Director of Latin American, Caribbean & Iberian Studies. She co-chairs UW-Madison’s Human Rights Program and has affiliations in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies. Her current research dynamics of human migration in Latin American and examines foreign policy relations and rhetorics in a transnational era, considering as case studies collaborations between the United States, Mexico, and Central American countries since the 1980s to address regional issues such as drug trafficking, corruption, and violence. She also leads a collaborative project to expand the legal information about US immigration and refugee programs and legal counsel available to migrants throughout Latin America as they consider safe options for movement and resettlement. You can find more information about this project at https://migrationamericas.commarts.wisc.edu/