I am an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and affiliate of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. I hold a PhD in Justice, Law and Criminology from American University (2016), an MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Eastern Michigan University (2011), and a BA in Social Anthropology and Peace and Social Justice from the University of Michigan (2009). Prior to completing my PhD, I spent several years as a community organizer with the Washtenaw County Workers' Center (WCWC), a bilingual worker rights center, where I later served as an interim Board Member. I have also volunteered and worked with a number of immigrant justice and legal aid organizations in Michigan and the DC-area, including the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition (CAIR Coalition), the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), Foundation Angie (Fundación Angie), and Justice For Our Neighbors (JFON).
Selected Works: Bridging the disciplines of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Law and Society, my research examines the intersections of fairness, identity, law, and power. I explore a range of topics, from capital punishment and the legal profession to gangs, immigration, and policing. Conducted using interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches, my research is united by efforts to address questions of race and ethnicity, class, and gender in the broader context of crime and crime control. Overall, my work makes significant empirical and theoretical contributions to our understandings of crimmigration, legal consciousness, procedural justice, and state-corporate crime that have both scholarly and real-world implications.
Articles, Books, and Chapters
Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America's Death Penalty Lawyers (NYU Press), coauthored with Dr. Jon Gould, explores the many facets of capital practice. Grounded in 60 in-depth interviews with capital defense attorneys from across the country, the book covers issues of race and gender, the attorney-client relationship, and the effects of capital work on those involved. The book makes significant contributions to our understandings of capital punishment and capital defense as a sociolegal field of practice.
I am currently completing my first solo-authored book, Is Immigration Court Unfair? Procedural Justice, Deportation, and Immigrant Legal Consciousness, under contract with NYU Press. This book centers immigration stories as told by Central Americans, their family members, and the attorneys who represent them. Engaging with criminological and sociolegal literature, I reveal how and why the normative rules of fairness, legitimacy, and compliance do not apply in the immigration context. I challenge commonly held assertions that problems in US immigration court can be resolved through the advancement of due process protections (e.g. right to indigent defense) and bureaucratic changes (e.g. hiring additional immigration judges). Joining an emergent body of “second wave” scholarship that addresses the absence of culture, diversity, and identity in traditional procedural justice literature, this book makes a case for a radical reimagining of both procedural justice and the US immigration system.
In “Motherhood and Immigration Policy: How Immigration Law Shapes Central Americans’ Experiences of Family,” as part of the peer-reviewed edited volume, Forced Out and Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Field (Oxford University Press), I interrogate the intersections of gender, family, and immigration law. I argue that immigration law not only produces “legal” and “illegal” immigrants, but “good” and “bad” mothers, with the power to redefine the meaning and experience of both motherhood and denizenship.
I continue my explorations of immigration, law, and family through the lens of state-corporate crime in “Family separation as state-corporate crime,” published in the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime (2021 Outstanding Article or Book Chapter Award, Division of White-Collar and Corporate Crime, American Society of Criminology). The article documents the Trump administration's role in normalizing harmful state practices that, in collaboration with private and nonprofit actors, violate migrants’ human and legal rights and facilitate crimes against migrant children and families. A study in “crimes of the powerful,” this piece explores the myriad legal and illegal harms perpetrated against migrants in the US. It also highlights the ways that powerful actors weaponize the language of care and protection in the pursuit of migration controls and profit.
Maintaining a state-centered gaze, “Conceptual and empirical obstacles in defining MS-13: Law-enforcement perspectives,” published in the prestigious Criminology and Public Policy, reveals the state’s power to shape identity through the criminalization of youth of color. Funded by the National Institute of Justice, my coauthors and I provide empirical accounts of how law enforcement experts operationalize gang membership at the nexus of the immigration and the criminal justice systems, as well as the related collateral consequences of such practices.
I, along with my coauthors, further explore interactions between law enforcement and immigrant communities in “Perceptions of justice among Guatemalan-Mayans and Latinos of South Florida: A call for further study of procedural justice in minority communities,” which has been accepted for publication in Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order. This work builds upon my previous policing scholarship examining matters of deviance, compliance, and procedural justice in protest settings. For example, in “The effects of procedural justice on the use of violence against the police by Occupy Wall Street protesters,” my coauthors and I turn our attention to contestations of state power, illuminating the relationship between protester perceptions of police fairness and the propensity to use violence against state actors.
Public Criminology
In addition to engaging in traditional scholarship, in the fall of 2019 I coauthored “The Salvadorian Willie Horton: MS-13, electoral politics and racialized fear mongering,” published in Citizen Critics, a “nonpartisan, independent analysis space” that engages academics and experts in critical analysis and discussion for “a broad, global audience.” My work on MS-13 has led me to serve as an expert panelist on gang database transparency for Virginia’s The Activated People and as volunteer consultant for the Capitol Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR) Coalition, in Washington, DC. I have also appeared on Culture and Crime Talks with host Dr. Sarah Daly to discuss crimmigration, legal consciousness, and plea bargaining through the pop culture lens of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. These opportunities have allowed me to engage with a variety of lay, practitioner, and scholarly audiences.
Ongoing Research
In addition to my book project and I am part of three collaborative projects--Assessing the Transnational Criminal Capacity of MS-13 in the U.S. and El Salvador, Guatemalan-Maya Procedural Justice and Legitimacy Project, and the National Immigration Lawyer Survey.
Future Plans
Ultimately, my work is grounded in a constant exploration of structural inequalities in the American criminal justice and immigration systems, as well as attention to the ways in which criminal justice actors and laypeople understand their experiences with crime, crime control, and the law. I plan to extend my existing research into comparisons of the lives and work of capital defense and immigration attorneys, the intersections of immigration and gang controls, and the parallels between marginalized and hyper-surveilled immigrant and inner-city communities of color.
Selected Works: Bridging the disciplines of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Law and Society, my research examines the intersections of fairness, identity, law, and power. I explore a range of topics, from capital punishment and the legal profession to gangs, immigration, and policing. Conducted using interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches, my research is united by efforts to address questions of race and ethnicity, class, and gender in the broader context of crime and crime control. Overall, my work makes significant empirical and theoretical contributions to our understandings of crimmigration, legal consciousness, procedural justice, and state-corporate crime that have both scholarly and real-world implications.
Articles, Books, and Chapters
Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America's Death Penalty Lawyers (NYU Press), coauthored with Dr. Jon Gould, explores the many facets of capital practice. Grounded in 60 in-depth interviews with capital defense attorneys from across the country, the book covers issues of race and gender, the attorney-client relationship, and the effects of capital work on those involved. The book makes significant contributions to our understandings of capital punishment and capital defense as a sociolegal field of practice.
I am currently completing my first solo-authored book, Is Immigration Court Unfair? Procedural Justice, Deportation, and Immigrant Legal Consciousness, under contract with NYU Press. This book centers immigration stories as told by Central Americans, their family members, and the attorneys who represent them. Engaging with criminological and sociolegal literature, I reveal how and why the normative rules of fairness, legitimacy, and compliance do not apply in the immigration context. I challenge commonly held assertions that problems in US immigration court can be resolved through the advancement of due process protections (e.g. right to indigent defense) and bureaucratic changes (e.g. hiring additional immigration judges). Joining an emergent body of “second wave” scholarship that addresses the absence of culture, diversity, and identity in traditional procedural justice literature, this book makes a case for a radical reimagining of both procedural justice and the US immigration system.
In “Motherhood and Immigration Policy: How Immigration Law Shapes Central Americans’ Experiences of Family,” as part of the peer-reviewed edited volume, Forced Out and Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Field (Oxford University Press), I interrogate the intersections of gender, family, and immigration law. I argue that immigration law not only produces “legal” and “illegal” immigrants, but “good” and “bad” mothers, with the power to redefine the meaning and experience of both motherhood and denizenship.
I continue my explorations of immigration, law, and family through the lens of state-corporate crime in “Family separation as state-corporate crime,” published in the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime (2021 Outstanding Article or Book Chapter Award, Division of White-Collar and Corporate Crime, American Society of Criminology). The article documents the Trump administration's role in normalizing harmful state practices that, in collaboration with private and nonprofit actors, violate migrants’ human and legal rights and facilitate crimes against migrant children and families. A study in “crimes of the powerful,” this piece explores the myriad legal and illegal harms perpetrated against migrants in the US. It also highlights the ways that powerful actors weaponize the language of care and protection in the pursuit of migration controls and profit.
Maintaining a state-centered gaze, “Conceptual and empirical obstacles in defining MS-13: Law-enforcement perspectives,” published in the prestigious Criminology and Public Policy, reveals the state’s power to shape identity through the criminalization of youth of color. Funded by the National Institute of Justice, my coauthors and I provide empirical accounts of how law enforcement experts operationalize gang membership at the nexus of the immigration and the criminal justice systems, as well as the related collateral consequences of such practices.
I, along with my coauthors, further explore interactions between law enforcement and immigrant communities in “Perceptions of justice among Guatemalan-Mayans and Latinos of South Florida: A call for further study of procedural justice in minority communities,” which has been accepted for publication in Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order. This work builds upon my previous policing scholarship examining matters of deviance, compliance, and procedural justice in protest settings. For example, in “The effects of procedural justice on the use of violence against the police by Occupy Wall Street protesters,” my coauthors and I turn our attention to contestations of state power, illuminating the relationship between protester perceptions of police fairness and the propensity to use violence against state actors.
Public Criminology
In addition to engaging in traditional scholarship, in the fall of 2019 I coauthored “The Salvadorian Willie Horton: MS-13, electoral politics and racialized fear mongering,” published in Citizen Critics, a “nonpartisan, independent analysis space” that engages academics and experts in critical analysis and discussion for “a broad, global audience.” My work on MS-13 has led me to serve as an expert panelist on gang database transparency for Virginia’s The Activated People and as volunteer consultant for the Capitol Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR) Coalition, in Washington, DC. I have also appeared on Culture and Crime Talks with host Dr. Sarah Daly to discuss crimmigration, legal consciousness, and plea bargaining through the pop culture lens of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. These opportunities have allowed me to engage with a variety of lay, practitioner, and scholarly audiences.
Ongoing Research
In addition to my book project and I am part of three collaborative projects--Assessing the Transnational Criminal Capacity of MS-13 in the U.S. and El Salvador, Guatemalan-Maya Procedural Justice and Legitimacy Project, and the National Immigration Lawyer Survey.
Future Plans
Ultimately, my work is grounded in a constant exploration of structural inequalities in the American criminal justice and immigration systems, as well as attention to the ways in which criminal justice actors and laypeople understand their experiences with crime, crime control, and the law. I plan to extend my existing research into comparisons of the lives and work of capital defense and immigration attorneys, the intersections of immigration and gang controls, and the parallels between marginalized and hyper-surveilled immigrant and inner-city communities of color.
