Engagement and Contestation: Immigration Advocacy and the Paradox of Legal Resistance

This thesis examines the paradox of legal advocacy within the contemporary U.S. immigration system, a regime increasingly defined by the convergence of criminal and immigration law and the expansion of executive enforcement authority. Against the backdrop of intensified anti-immigrant policies under the second Trump administration, this study asks whether legal advocacy remains a meaningful strategy for immigrant defense. If participation in the legal system exposes undocumented individuals to heightened surveillance and detention, should advocates withdraw from legal institutions altogether, or can legal engagement still function as a site of resistance? Drawing on the scholarship of Cristina Beltran, Daniel Kanstroom, Juliet Stumpf, Jacqueline Bhabha, and Anna Terwiel, this thesis situates contemporary immigration governance within a longer history of racialized exclusion and deportation regimes in the United States. Through an institutional analysis of the immigration court system and a case study of the Immigrant Defense Project in New York City, the research demonstrates how immigrant advocates navigate the tension between resisting state power and operating within a legal framework that can reproduce that power. Ultimately, the thesis argues that legal advocacy, despite its inherent risks and complicities, remains a necessary terrain of contestation. Rather than viewing engagement with law as either resistance or complicity, immigrant defense must operate across a spectrum of strategies that combine legal advocacy with community-based organizing and solidarity networks to challenge exclusion and assert political agency.