State Disappearances in the United States: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis About the Enactment of State Terror on Undocumented Immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Abstract:State violence in the so-called United States impacting undocumented immigrants living under the construction of (il)legality calls for a decolonial feminist enactment of psychosocial research. This article presents a multi-scalar analysis of the embodied aftermath of state violence, enacted through the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) practice of state disappearances, on two undocumented Latina immigrants. Centering on decolonial feminisms and drawing on liberation psychology and intersectionality, this study investigates the embodied sequelae of living undocumented under the terror of ICE. This study undertakes a secondary analysis of two interviews that were selected from a larger database of in-depth interviews (N = 39). The two stories were selected considering gender and explicitness of the embodied aftermath of psychosocial torture by ICE. The data was gathered in Austin, Texas in 2019, marking a year after the two largest ICE raids in recent history which together resulted in the arrests of at least 304 Latinx immigrants in Central, South, and North Texas. ICE terror has embodied, affective, and material consequences on those who are subjected to such violence; therefore, a decolonial feminist analysis about the embodied impacts of state violence and its sequela contribute to understandings of decolonial feminist enactment of qualitative analytic methods in psychology.