I received the Marcus Bach Fellowship for the Fall 2025 semester. This fellowship allowed me to complete a full draft of my dissertation, which analyzes the complicated relationship between religion and immigration enforcement in the United States since the 1980s. In the early 1980s, U.S.-funded civil conflicts in Central America displaced thousands of people who in turn migrated northward to the United States. Many of these migrants were being detained by Border Patrol agents and deported to countries where they faced violent reprisals. An ecumenical group of religious people in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands responded by offering refuge to Central American migrants inside of their churches. In 1993, the Immigration and Naturalization Service developed a written policy that prevented them from entering spaces used for religious worship. This meant that those in sanctuary could find safety inside of the church but could not leave the grounds without risk of apprehension. These policies, I argue, imbued churches with a carceral logic that made them places of refuge and entrapment.

The second case study in my dissertation is the development of a religious network of migrant care in the 21st century. As an increasing number of families with children arrived at the southern border in the 2010s, federal immigration agencies shifted their strategy from keeping people in immigration detention centers to releasing people under digital surveillance mechanisms like ankle monitors. Initially, Border Patrol released hundreds of migrants at places like Greyhound stations near the border, leading to public backlash. In response, federal immigration agencies turned to faith-based organizations like Catholic Charities who developed a network of migrant shelters where the Border Patrol could release migrants who they had detained an processed. I argue that these shelters both provided needed humanitarian care to migrants while being part of what Michel Foucault called the carceral archipelago, a continuum of institutions meant to discipline people. Much scholarship on religion and immigration has focused on the ways that religious people and institutions work for migrant justice. My dissertation highlights the surprising ways that religion is also a surprising collaborator in state strategies of immigration control.