Asad L. Asad

Friends! Inherited Inequality makes its debut Sept 16 🎉

Join me for an open & honest conversation about the power & limits of the two-parent family for improving child outcomes & addressing one of America’s most intractable problems: racial inequality

Hope to see you there!

New Orleans May Hand Its Police Live Facial Recognition Tech. Critics Warn It’ll Help ICE. The city says it won’t lend this tool to ICE for surveillance. But a state law requires that local officials assist ICE, and New Orleans also wants to end a court order restricting compliance.

ICE is seeking increasing amounts of data from localities. “We’re seeing more and more signs, especially in ‘sanctuary cities,’ where the federal government’s requests are getting bigger and bigger,” says an immigration law expert.

Title: The study of culture, law, and crisis Author: Matthew Clair, Stanford University Date: July 2025 Abstract: This paper reviews cultural sociological approaches to the study of law and how they may be applied to future research on law-related social crises. As the world faces myriad social crises, such as rising authoritarianism and police violence, the study of culture and the law has become an even more urgent intellectual and practical endeavor. Over the last decade, five concepts have dominated the cultural study of law: rules, norms, frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness. While past research has provided generative insight, future research would benefit from more precise considerations of rules and norms in this unsettled moment. Moreover, future research could leverage the five cultural concepts to sharpen understandings of inequality and social control in understudied legal organizations, along understudied axes of social stratification, and with respect to the infusion of new technologies into the legal system. Acknowledgments: Thank you to Asad L. Asad, Sarah Brayne, and Barbara Kiviat for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Law is central to today’s social crises—from democratic backsliding to immigrant exclusion. This paper shows how cultural sociology offers rigorous explanations of, and insights into how to tackle, law-related crises. Hope it’s useful to law and society scholars and others

osf.io/preprints/so...

W/ immigrant detention constantly in the news, I share my portfolio of peer-reviewed research on harms of this system. In @jamanetworkopen.com, we show alarmingly high prevalence of poor health, mental illness & PTSD for all, w/ esp high rates for those detained 6+mo. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Reminder that this is illegal. The IRS has statutory rules that forbid them-except under very specific conditions-from sharing data. The reason is very practical-if people don't trust the IRS they will avoid 'voluntarily' paying taxes. The tax system falls apart otherwise.

Immigration enforcement *is* a public health crisis, and a longstanding one at that. It harms both physical and mental health, and its effects burden immigrants and the U.S. born alike.

The White House has ordered the US Dept. of Justice to prioritize denaturalization: voiding the citizenship of US citizens.

Who will it denaturalize? "Any" case that it "determines to be sufficiently important".

Point 10 leaves the criteria opaque and arbitrary.

substack.com/redirect/169...

Listen to the Ideas #Podcast with Asad L. Asad and @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social Network editor, Caleb Zakarin. They discuss how undocumented immigrants in the United States navigate surveillance and punishment, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins.

hubs.ly/Q03sKGLP0

It's publication day for Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, available in paper & free .epub! It traces a century of struggle over Los Angeles' periphery, culminating in the use of policing to expel and repress Black tenants. Here's a look at its chapters:

For nearly 60 days, Israel has blocked food from Gaza. Palestinians struggle to feed their families For nearly 60 days, no food, fuel, medicine or other item has entered the Gaza Strip, blocked by Israel.

For nearly 60 days, no food, fuel, medicine or other items has entered the Gaza Strip, blocked by Israel.

Aid groups are running out of food to distribute. Markets are nearly bare.

Palestinian families are left struggling to feed their children.

New article theorizing the “spatial burdens” of state institutions. Drawing on 125 interviews and over 400 hours of observations among court-involved people in the Bay Area, we show how space shapes poverty governance and institutional inequality.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Some commentary is focusing on how the Supreme Court order last night seems to indicate a vibe shift among some justices on whether courts can rely on representations made by Trump administration lawyers.

‘If I die, I want a loud death’: Gaza photojournalist killed by Israeli airstrike Fatima Hassouna, who had been documenting war in Gaza for 18 months and was subject of new documentary, killed along with 10 members of her family As a young photojournalist living in Gaza, Fatima Hassouna knew that death was always at her doorstep. As she spent the past 18 months of war documenting airstrikes, the demolition of her home, the endless displacement and the killing of 11 family members, all she demanded was that she not be allowed to go quietly. “If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna wrote on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.” Continue reading...

‘If I die, I want a loud death’: Gaza photojournalist killed by Israeli airstrike

Trump is Quietly Building a Deportation Army out of State and Local Agencies Enrollment in the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police to do federal immigration enforcement, has exploded in recent weeks—but the administration has been surprisingly silent.

Trump is Quietly Building a Deportation Army out of State and Local Agencies

Enrollment in the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police to do federal immigration enforcement, has exploded in recent weeks.

austinkocher.substack.com/p/trump-is-q...

I have joined several dozen scholars across the social sciences in signing on to an amicus brief supporting both immigration and birthright citizenship in State of Washington v. Trump.

Read the brief here: www.courtlistener.com/docket/69621...

I.R.S. Agrees to Share Migrants’ Tax Information with ICE The agreement is a major departure from the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to gain the trust of migrants and encourage them to file their taxes.

This is a wrongheaded move that will simultaneously sever noncitizens’ relationship to state institutions, threaten the well-being of immigrant families, and deprive Social Security beneficiaries of a tax base that has allowed the program to remain solvent. Shame.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/u...

NEW in Law & Society Review: U.S. Latinos are less likely to report institutional involvement as immigration policing intensifies—but those involved don’t spend less time. Spatial & temporal variation in formal control shapes system involvement.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Eastern Sociological Society has named @asadasad.bsky.social's book Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life the Winner of the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award!

Learn more about this groundbreaking book:
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

😂

Honored to be in great company!

Thanks to @erikaandiola.bsky.social, @nicoleramos.bsky.social, and @daralind.bsky.social for joining us!

Read more about the discussion here: stanforddaily.com/2025/02/10/i...

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

Orange poster describing event featuring three immigration advocates discussing advocacy and reform following 2024 US presidential election.

Honored to welcome @daralind.bsky.social, @erikaandiola.bsky.social, & @nicoleramos.bsky.social to Stanford today to reflect on what immigration advocacy and reform will look like over the next few years—and where it might go thereafter. Grateful for the chance to learn from these inspiring leaders.

In red text: WE ARE BACK! Previously trac.syr.edu Now serving the public from our new domain. tracreports.org Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

TRAC is back.
tracreports.org

A report summarizing our systems navigator pilot in a public defender’s office in San Jose. We offer recommendations for the county and other public defense agencies across the country.

osf.io/preprints/so...

We made you another fact sheet -- this one about the declaration issued by the Acting DHS Sec that came out Friday that the U.S. is facing a "mass influx" endangering "all 50 states," and calling on states/localities to help

www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/mas...

Jan. 8, 2025, 2:54 PM EST By Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council Who runs the U.S. immigration system? If the Senate passes the Laken Riley Act this week, the answer might not be Congress or the president. The bill, already passed in the House, would hand state attorneys general, like Ken Paxton in Texas, veto power over large swaths of federal immigration policy. Under a provision of the bill that has gotten little attention, federal courts in places like Texas and Louisiana could hear lawsuits seeking to impose sweeping bans on all visas from countries such as India and China. State officials could also seek court orders forcing the government to deport a specific individual without the sign-off of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

New from me: The Laken Riley Act could hand decisions about the enforcement of many immigration laws to state attorneys general and any one of 677 federal district judges around the country; including decisions to issue visa bans to entire nations. The consequences could be extremely far-reaching.

The limits and possibilities of segmented assimilation theory Segmented assimilation in its current U.S.-centric incarnation is more valuable as a sensitizing concept that suggests where analysts should look rather than as a transportable causal theory of int...

Sharing my new open-access article on "The limits and possibilities of segmented assimilation theory". www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Opinion | The House GOP’s first bill of 2025 could enable a Ken Paxton power grab New legislation would hand state attorneys general veto power over large swaths of federal immigration policy.

Because the Laken Riley Act has significant D support, there hasn’t been much attention to what the bill would actually do.

Which is bad!

Because, like, it would allow Ken Paxton to sue the feds to stop issuing all visas to China!

From @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Even if this bill never becomes law, we show in PNAS that it likely contributes to an “everyday” environment of deportation threat that is uniquely distressing for Latino U.S. citizens and noncitizens.

With Amy L. Johnson, Chris Levesque, and @neillewisjr.bsky.social.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...