On September 5th, 2017, the Trump administration derailed the world of hundreds of thousands of young adults—DACAmented immigrants— and their families, with the declaration that the policy “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) be terminated. Enacted by President Obama in 2012, DACA provides protection from deportation for some individuals who entered the United States as children without proper documentation. The initial announcements of its end, first made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then by Trump, sparked immedi ate public response. There was, of course, some public support for the announcement, from immigration-restrictionist organizations as well as from those hoping the repeal would lead to more comprehensive immigration reform legislation (Alvarez, 2017; Barreto, 2017; Silver stein, 2017). However, media accounts of the repeal were overwhelmingly f illed with protests as politicians, corporate executives, everyday citizens, DACAmented individuals, and their families called foul (Battaglio, 2017; king & Carcamo, 2017). In a rare directed attack on Trump, President Obama responded: “To target these young people is wrong … It is self- defeating … And it is cruel” (quoted in kimball, 2017). Similarly, Face book founder Mark zuckerberg named the move “particularly cruel” (quoted in Shear & Davis, 2017). Even House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) initially spoke in opposition to the repeal, allegedly calling on Trump in the days before the announcement to keep the policy in place (kopan & Acosta, 2017). By late in the day on September 5th, Trump had revised his initial declaration and established a window of negotiation, tweeting “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA … If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!” and declaring his support for the DACAmented: “I have a love for these people” (quoted in kopan, 2017). The announcements by both Sessions and Trump named the ending of DACA in mostly racially neutral terms—framing the issue as one of con stitutional violation perpetrated by Obama’s willful politics. As Trump proclaimed, “President Obama … [made] an end-run around Congress … violating the core tenets that sustain our republic” (Trump, 2017). Session commented that DACA was created in ways that were “inconsistent with the Constitution’s separation of power” (quoted in Beckwith, 2017). Still, while both announcements emphasized Obama’s misdoings and the imperative for Trump to right the course of immigration law, both also turned explicitly to race. Trump, veering briefly from his references to Obama’s ill-considered if not authoritarian move, referenced a “mas sive surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America including, in some cases, young people who would become members of violent gangs throughout our country” (Trump, 2017), while Sessions announced that we “cannot admit everyone who would like to come here” (quoted in Beckwith, 2017). The overwhelming impetus for the ending of DACA, citizens were told, was premised in the racially coded language of law and order: “Simply put, if we are to further our goal of strengthening the con stitutional order and the rule of law in America, the Department of Justice cannot defend … [Obama’s] overreach” (quoted in Beckwith, 2017). In the immediate days and weeks that followed, the outcry over the decision continued. Many commentators raised the magnitude of the re peal, noting that some 700,000–800,000 youth, often named Dreamers, would be affected (Bennett, 2017; Bennett & Mascaro, 2017). Others reiterated the early language of Obama, naming the decision cruel, reckless, and inhumane (Palomarez, 2017; Watanabe, 2017) as well as a testament to the kind of nation we do not want to be (king & Carcamo, 2017). Democratic leaders vowed to fight the decision (McGreevy, 2017; Toure, 2017). Across the chorus of disapproval was a strikingly consistent argument: the 800,000 or so now-vulnerable and frightened individuals were innocent youth who deserved better. These youngsters, filled with hopes and dreams, ready to contribute to the only nation they had ever known, were a part of this nation—even if their entry was problematic. In this essay, we turn to these representations of the DACAmented to ask how the discourse surrounding the repeal of DACA sheds light into the current machinations of race and whiteness. Across our anal ysis, we attend to this pervasive attachment to the lives and futures of the DACAmented, a discourse we find strikingly different—if not unique—in national conversations on (un)documented immigration. We argue that the discourses surrounding DACA, including both dom inant media representations and reported voices of the DACAmented themselves, function as modes of rhetorical racialization. This racial ization pivots primarily on the prevalence of support for DACA—a sup port that manifests through a narrative of the DACAmented as good and deserving immigrants who have been forced back into deportabil ity, and thus into fear and illegality. We suggest that in the constitutive rhetorical logic of deportability, support for DACA turns on two poles of race— pawnability and stoppage. We begin by thinking through the literature on deportability and its implications for illegality. Drawing then on the work of Sara Ahmed, we suggest that the constitutive logic of deportability is, at its core, an affective logic, primarily of 200 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez race. We then turn to the prominent narratives of support—the good DACAmented immigrant and the fearful DACAmented immigrant. Here, we situate the good immigrant through pawnability and the fearful immigrant through illegality and stoppage. We conclude by naming the intersecting force of pawnability and stoppage the night mare of whiteness. Race, Deportability, and Illegality In recent years, scholars invested in questions of nation and immigra tion have turned a critical eye to a national, if not global, emphasis on deportation as the immediate solution to perceived immigrant problems (e.g., Bloch & Schuster, 2005; Boehm, 2016; kanstroom, 2007, 2012). Indeed, the rise of deportation, as both practice and discourse, has been named a “deportation regime”—a “paramount technique for refortify ing political, racial, and class-based boundaries” (Peutz & De Genova, 2010, p. 4). As De Genova (2010) argues, “the practice of deportation has … emerged as a definite and increasingly pervasive convention of routine statecraft” (p. 34). The practices of deportation today, as across history, increasingly serve not just as mechanisms of removal, but as ev eryday techniques of power and surveillance, writing (il)legitimacy and (im)morality into national codes of belonging. Within the United States, deportation has a long and storied con dition. Though ostensibly serving as a mechanism for protecting the nation, deportation has been a crucial tool through which the nation crafts—and maintains—its identity and character. Originating formally in 1882, with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which allowed for the deportation of Chinese laborers, deportation was initially deemed an act of national protection, not a mode of punishment nor a means through which to control the racial, ethnic, or class composition of the nation (Hester, 2017). Still, as deportation law developed, between 1882 and the 1920s, the categories of deportability, strangely akin to those of inadmissibility—“‘idiots,’ the ‘insane,’ ‘paupers,’ ‘polygamists,’ ‘per sons liable to become a public charge,’ people convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving ‘moral turpitude,’ to sufferers ‘from a loathsome or dangerous’ contagious disease”— suggested that deportation law was indeed a mechanism through which the nation’s character, if not color, was being created (Hester, 2017, p. 26). In his account of the origins of deportation law, kanstroom (2000) argues that the cases which first established deportation law emerged in a “power ful convergence of racial, ideological, cultural, and doctrinal factors” (p. 1906). Similarly, Buff (2008), attendant to the connections between the origins of deportation law and its contemporary practice, concludes: “the history of deportation in the twentieth century maps connections between economic restrictionism, political repression, and racialized nativism” (p. 537). The deportation regime and the rhetoric of deporta tion in the contemporary political moment is derivative of the history of racializing logics of deportability. In large part, the identity work of deportation, or what we might name more simply the whiteness of deportation, lies in the ways that deporta tion policy and deportations themselves serve as evidence of a nation’s power and sovereignty (Peutz & De Genova, 2010, p. 10). As Cornelisse (2010) explains, deportation proves the nation’s power to expel despite, if not because of, its own faulty immigration laws (p. 104). That is, to the degree that U.S. immigration laws do not (cannot, are not actually de signed to) exclude certain “undesirable” populations—those who do our cheap labor, for instance—deportation demonstrates the state’s power over its residents. Indeed, kanstroom (2007) concludes that deportation law, at least within the United States, functions partly as what he names “post entry social control,” regulating, seemingly without end, the lives of non-citizens (p. 2–6; see also kanstroom, 2000). Consider here the designation “likely to become a public charge” (lPC) (see Hester, 2017, p. 141–169). The public charge language emerged initially, in 1882, as a category of immigrant inadmissibility, precluding entry to those sus pected of relying on social services. By 1891, the language had changed such that one could be denied entry or be deported if they were “likely to become” a public charge. Over time, the period upon which a person was subject to deportation through lPC grew, creating ever-longer windows of heightened vulnerability in which any number of actions—appeals for social services, illnesses, loss of employment—made one susceptible. As Molina (2010) argues, the lPC clause, for those Mexicans who regularly came and went from Mexico, “created a near-continuous potential for deportation” (p. 643, emphasis added). kanstroom (2007) reiterates this “near-continuous potential,” explaining that “a noncitizen may be de ported for conduct that was not a deportable offense when it occurred” (p. 6). It is in deportability, its perpetual fluidity and volatility, that de portation law has its most potent force. It is on this point that scholarship on deportation is adamant. Actual deportations are traumatic and horrific; still, the disciplinary force of de portation lies as much—if not more—in deportability as in deportation itself. It is deportability, which Hester (2017) defines simply as “the status of being deportable,” that conscripts the lives of precarious populations (p. 1). Peutz and De Genova (2010) explain: “it is deportability, then or the protracted possibility of being deported—along with the multiple vulnerabilities that this susceptibility for deportation engenders—that is the real effect of these policies and practices” (p. 14). Deportability, manifested through media representations and DACAmented voices, functions racially in discourses seek center the “bad immigrant” who can harm “real” Americans as well as in circulating emphasis on fear and vulnerability, which constitutes individuals as “illegal.” 202 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez The implications of deportability for those situated within it are con siderable. Notable is the impact of deportability on labor. Consider here Maira’s (2010) invocation that deportability is linked to the im perial state. This connection, though complex and multifaceted, serves the nation through the ways that deportability positions individuals as disposable labor. Cockcroft (1986) details the discrepancies between deportations and deportability, noting that, even in times of height ened nativism, when considerable public and political attention is given to deportation, the number of deportations pales in comparison to the number of undocumented immigrants allowed to enter the coun try: “deportation and importation … occur simultaneously” so that a constant oversupply of anxious workers is always available (p. 42). De Genova (2004) concurs: “deportability … provides an apparatus for sus taining Mexican migrants’ vulnerability and tractability—as workers— whose labor power, inasmuch as it is deportable, becomes an eminently disposable commodity” (p. 161). Deportability, then, while certainly an effect of one’s legal residency status, is much more than that. Indeed, we suggest that deportability functions rhetorically as a racial project. It is in deportability that bodies are racialized. Maira (2010) claims that the logic of deportation regimes is a constitutive one (p. 299), which De Genova (2002) names the “‘il legality’ effect,” that spectacle—the invasions and floods that dominate public discourse, the deleterious effects on the nation and its rightful citizens—that has to be endlessly created anew so as to sustain the cul tural climate of deportability (p. 437). While deportability is produced and sustained through legal mechanism, it exceeds those legal parame ters, circulating discursively, fixing bodies (often regardless of residency status) within it. If the constitutive—racializing—logic of deportability lies in the production of illegality, and thus, vulnerability, then what is clear is that this logic is not just a constitutive logic, but an affective one. The Affective Force of Deportability Theories of affect have generated considerable insight among scholars interested in both race and in rhetoric. In part, affect theory takes us to the immediacy of bodies. For rhetorical scholars, such arguments turn to questions of representation and circulation, identification, and bod ies. For critical race scholars, affect theory illuminates the intersections of race and racism, taking us to race as a saturated way of being. At the intersections of rhetoric and race, we suggest, affect theory helps us think through the complex and contradictory materialization of bod ies. As scholars of affect theory maintain, affective energies—those dis tributions of emotion, laden with histories, politics, experiences, and memories—mobilize and motivate, generating (dis)affiliations and (dis) identifications. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) note, “Affect … is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion— that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and exten sion” (p. 1, emphasis in original). Reliant on, though not reducible to discourse, affects intensify and circulate through and across both bodies and the discourses those bodies invoke and evoke. To think race and affect is to center bodies as the carriers—the signs, vehicles, storehouses—of culture, politics, and histories and to place those bodies within the cultures, they come to comprise. Indeed, it is to suggest, as Ehlers (2012) does, that race “is the effect of affect” (p. 85). Ahmed (2004b) writes, “It is through affective encounters that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which ‘gives’ the subject an identity that is apart from others” (pp. 52–53). Hate and fear, love and intimacy surface on bodies—raced bodies—creating the very “surfaces” and “boundaries” of those bodies, constituting and locating them in their worlds (Ahmed, 2004a, p. 117). McCann (2016), reminding us that affect precedes race, explains, “the mobilization and, therefore, capture of affect enables its expression” (p. 134).1 Contemporary racial politics and discourses, such as those surround ing conversations and debate on DACA, are laden with the circulations and attachments of affect, the fear and hatred, the hope and promise, which surface on bodies in ways that manage and organize both ra cial and social politics. In this way, the political implications of affect for race are significant. Our very participation in and affiliation with race is channeled through our affective orientations. In part, as Cloud (2003) explains, our identities and affinities morph through what she names the “affected” public, “an artificial social construct that enforces emotional identification over heterogeneity and dissent” (p. 129, emphasis in original). Within this affected public, reasoning about race looks quite different, in part because reason is replaced with “feeling” (Chaput, 2010, p. 3). That is, our sense of belonging, if not our very sense of being, “contains a number of prior affective investments” linked to bodies that “look” or “feel” American or “alien” (Cisneros, 2012). It is in this constitutive force of affect that we see inroad for theoriz ing race, rhetoric, and racialization. We pause in this essay on two key concepts inspired for us in Ahmed’s work—pawnability and stoppage. In her discussion of race and temporality, Ahmed argues that race oper ates as what we might think of as a future/past guarantee, and in doing so, she suggests that the pawnability of race—its easy transfer across bodies—is a mode of racialization. That is, she suggests that experiences of race in the moment are premised on a collapse of future certainty with past certainty. We know that race is a danger or a threat partly because we know that raced bodies will, most certainly, bring harm to us. This futural certainty—this promise of race—is premised upon our certain knowledge that these raced bodies—in some ways almost 204 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez these very raced bodies—have brought danger and harm to us in the past (Ahmed, 2004b, p. 79). As she explains, in these instantaneous shifts be tween past and present, these shifts that manifest in the present, the partic ularities of raced bodies morph into universalities. A single moment comes to define a feeling, an experience, a racial category. The swiftness of the associations, Ahmed suggests, the ease with which they can be transferred from body to body to body, seemingly endlessly, produces the pawnability of race, situated raced bodies as interchangeable. One horrific brown body can be (mis)recognized again and again among all horrific brown bodies. A second key mode of racialization that Ahmed inspires in our think ing is what we are naming here as stoppage. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) compares a White male body with a Black male body. She turns to Fanon and writes, “Fanon’s phenomenology of the black body could be described in terms of the bodily and social experience of restric tion, uncertainty and blockage, or perhaps even in terms of the despair of the utterance ‘I cannot’” (p. 139). She notes that for Merleau-Ponty, the successful (White) body is “able” to extend itself to act on and in the world. But, she continues, “to be black or not white in ‘the white world’ is to turn back toward oneself, to become an object, which means … being diminished as an effect of the bodily extensions of others: For bodies that are not extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stop ping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? Each question, when asked, is a kind of stopping device: you are stopped by being asked the question, just as the question requires you to be stopped. (p. 139) In climates of deportability, there is, of course, literal stoppage—raids, arrests, detentions—and each of these moments of literal stoppage is marked by the racializing questions: Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? Bodies are raced. As Cisneros (2012) suggests, they “look ‘illegal,’” and thus they become illegal, through stoppage (p. 139). Deportability constitutes individuals into illegality, we suggest, through stoppage, both literal and figurative. Across the analysis that follows, we suggest that representations of the DACAmented, both from dominant discourse and from their own voices, as represented in dominant discourse, consolidate circulating af fective energies around immigrants and citizens. More specifically, we suggest that representations of DACA and the DACAmented racialize, and they do so in part through pawnability and stoppage. We identify two key themes in the discourse that function critically to racialize: DACAmented as good and deserving immigrants and the end of DACA as fearful. Despite our attention in the analysis to representations of the DACAmented, our argument on racialization turns as much to the ra cialization of non-DACAmented immigrants than to the DACAmented themselves. In short, we suggest that the two key themes serve to ra cialize non-DACAmented immigrants as other. That racialization lies in the affective force of support, which we argue positions the DACA mented as racial pawns, and of fear, which functions as a stoppage mechanism. Race, Racialization, and DACA Any casual consumer of public media is likely familiar with the prev alent narratives surrounding immigration in the United States. In the oft-told tale of the United States as a nation of immigrants, the United States stands as a nation made strong through its ability to forge its character and its path through the willing embrace of immigrants— those hardy and resourceful individuals who came to the country look ing to achieve the “American Dream”. That story, of course, stands in stark contrast to the other endlessly-reiterated narrative—the im migrant as threat and danger to the American people and their liveli hood. Immigrants are cast as those undeserving masses who come to the country in selfishness, if not criminality, to take from the country, but never to give to it. Figured across much recent discourse as Mexican (and perhaps latin American or Hispanic), these immigrants or “illegal aliens,” constitute one of the nation’s most serious problems. Given the salience of both frames, it is not surprising that conversations around DACA invoke the polarity of the deserving and the undeserving, the good and the unwelcome. Dreams of Whiteness I know they want the bad hombres out… I want them out to. But I’m not one of them (quoted in Dvorak, 2017) Through all of the pro- and anti-immigration rhetoric, there is little question of the “good immigrant/bad immigrant.” Rather, it is spoken as truth that some immigrants are “bad” and some immigrants are “good,” and we know it is “illegal aliens” who are bad, dangerous, undeserving. This long-standing frame, typically attached to Mexicans, carries such force that it has become somewhat of a trope for immigration itself. So how is it that the DACAmented evade this characterization, standing not as exemplars of the problems of immigration? For indeed, repre sentations of the DACAmented, both from dominant voices and from the DACAmented themselves, consistently situate DACAmented as good immigrants. 206 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez Crucial to this overall frame is the notion of innocence, a term that is pervasive in mediated accounts of the (potential) end of DACA.2 Over whelmingly, this idea that the DACAmented are innocent comes in dis cussions of their arrival. One account notes that the DACAmented “were brought here as children by their parents” (Decker, 2017), while another notes, “You have 800,000 young people, brought here, no fault of their own” (Mascaro, Bennett, & lauter, 2017). As these two representative fragments demonstrate, there are at least two clear patterns in the fram ing of innocence—the DACAmented are young, they were/are children, and they did not come here. They were brought. Thus, their actions were not criminal. Instead, as one headline notes, the DACAmented are “blameless” (Bruk, 2017). Readers learn the DACAmented are not only blameless, but they were often unaware of their status. Consider the testimony of Rafael Agustin: “I was in shock … I knew I was an immigrant … But I didn’t know we were undocumented immigrants” (quoted in Villarreal, 2017). Innocence works in these narratives as what Ahmed (2004b) terms a politics of alignment. “We” are invited into discussions of DACAmented immigrants as innocent and deserving to identify with them and to see them as like “us”—the rightful and deserving citizens of the nation. This identification, Ahmed (2004b) explains, is affectively saturated. We love those with whom we identify (p. 52). Consider the ways these attributions of innocence shape a larger narrative of the DACAmented as different. Yes, they are immigrants and they are undocumented, but, we learn, they are not like other immigrants. Named “the most sympa thetic of immigrants,” the DACAmented are framed within a narrative of belonging (Decker, 2017), while the non-DACAmented are framed by their “lack” of DACAmented status, by illegality. For instance, a state ment issued by Telemundo described the DACAmented as “valuable members of our community” (quoted in Battaglio, 2017), while an edi torial in the New York Times called them “Americans in every way that matters” (krugman, 2017). Similarly, University of California President, Janet Napolitano commented that “In all ways except one, they are American” (quoted in Watanabe, 2017). Even self-named Trump sup porters positioned the DACAmented and DACA as different from other immigrants and policies. For instance, Arizona resident Steve Feld noted that “You can’t send them back if they grew up here … That’s not fair,” while Sheryl Dressel, also an Arizona resident, proclaimed “They’re Americans” (quoted in Finnegan & Barabak, 2017). There is a hereness in these proclamations and representations, and that hereness names them as almost American. Belonging surfaces on the bodies of DACAmented immigrants, shap ing not just what Ahmed names their “skin,” their identity, but also bringing them in to the fold. In part, such surfacing emerges in dis cussion that emphasize the ways that the DACAmented participate in society. For instance, American politician leon Panetta (2017) went as far to say “They [dreamers] would make outstanding soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen.” DACAmented youth join in this narrative as well naming themselves as hard working, deserving of American opportunities, freedoms, and responsibilities because of their innocence. Their very stories of their commitment to the nation and their fit with “us” do the work of racialization. Indeed, across their nar ratives, we can see the performative racialization at play. Juan Escalante, from Tallahassee, Florida, explains that DACA allows individuals to contribute to their communities: “DACA beneficiaries could continue to pursue higher education, starting businesses, or putting their skills to use” (“American Dreamers”). Miriam Santamaria, a small business owner from Houston, Texas, explains, “We are not asking for handouts, only for an opportunity to work hard, pay taxes like other citizens, and mostly, live our lives in peace for the first time” (“American Dreamers”). Finally, Ana Sanchez, a student from Elgin, Texas, writes, “I want to give back to this country” (“American Dreamers”). In these snippets, we see the DACAmented written into the nation, becoming part of the dream. DACAmented immigrants, then, are not the undocumented immi grants we typically imagine, fear, and often hate. Instead, in many ways, the DACAmented emerge as vulnerable and deserving, even as normative citizens aligned with American values. Without question, these represen tations install a narrative that is curiously open. We suspect that this prevalent frame may signal some shifting boundaries between whiteness and other. Our interests, however, lie in the other implications of this frame or in the ways that innocence and deservingness serve as strat egies of racialization of criminal and undeserving. What, we wonder, does this construction do? How might it reproduce normative structures of whiteness? Is it possible that these frames, even in their considerable potential to disrupt whiteness, retrench it? Does the support for DACA serve the racialized—if not also economic—needs of the nation? Are the DACAmented merely racial pawns who serve in this narrative as a reminder of the dangers of immigration? The force of the narrative of innocence that runs through the dis course on DACA, perhaps as the defining frame of DACA, lies in its long history in U.S. public culture and memory. Good immigrants, those rug ged and enterprising individuals who came to this country, worked hard, and gave themselves to the nation—much like Ana Sanchez above— have long stood in as representations of national character and national identity—these immigrants transformed themselves into Americans and into whiteness. This temporal force, or the intensity and truth of historical memory, aligns DACAmented with the nation, surfacing na tional character—whiteness—on the very bodies of DACAmented. They were brought, as children. These hard working, innocent, and deserving 208 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez children are blameless and should not be punished, but protected.3 But of course, the surfacing, Ahmed reminds us, does not end at the skin of the individual. Instead, it bounds the social, constituting otherness. While these frames align the DACAmented with “whiteness,” so too do they call forth, relentlessly, otherness—the undeserving and the criminal. For if the DACA were brought, they were brought by others—knowing adults, often their parents, and these others continue to carry the burden of race. Indeed, we suggest, these others, who appear only rarely in the discourse, are magnified in their absence. Consider the almost complete lack of any discussion of the fate of their parents. A narrative concerned about innocent children would, seemingly, feature the parents or adults who care for those children. Curiously—or not so curiously—mention of parents is scarce. That which appears tends toward blame. As one letter writer, naming the end of DACA a “travesty,” notes, Dreamers are here “because their parents entered the country illegally” (lowenstein, 2017). It is in the narratives of support and the moves to alignment that white ness surfaces on DACAmented immigrants and racial otherness satu rates other “immigrants”—those “bad hombres.” For if there is support for DACA, there is also absolute insistence, often across party lines, that protecting DACA mandates (harsh) immigration reform. The special can be protected, but the rest of them must go. Quickly, readers learn, DACA may continue if Congress can pass harsh immigration laws (Mascaro, 2017; Scarborough, 2017). News reports repeatedly link support for DACA to the building of a border wall (Mascaro & Bierman, 2017) and to overall immigration reform, typically framed as entailing greater se curity and enforcement measures (Bennett & Tanfani, 2017; Shear & Davis, 2017). Often reiterating Trump’s vow to pass immigration re form that “provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve,” the news coverage frames the concerns around DACA such that what remains central is the narrative that immigration— and immigrants—are national problems, if not threats (quoted in “Is Trump,” 2017). Right now, all the high school students I work with are afraid (Aleman, quoted in Dougherty, 2017) If racialization occurs across the discourse surrounding DACA through pawnability, so too do we see racialization through stoppage. Climates of deportability persist and grow through affective climates of vulner ability and precarity, and the discourse surrounding the end of DACA illustrates, and exacerbates, this climate. In this section, we trace artic ulations of fear and vulnerability in representations of (DACAmented) immigrants and note the ways that vulnerability is articulated with movement—or stoppage. What emerges is a clear narrative in which DACAmented immigrants fear deportation and in that fear also risk los ing their dreams in the United States. If deported, their lives in the United States will reach immediate cessation. Put differently, deportation stops the current life trajectory of DACAmented immigrants. Meanwhile, the fear of deportation also works to freeze DACAmented immigrants in a state of worry, of uncertainty, of needing to retreat back to the shad ows. The fear of waiting to see what fate the Trump administration will decide for them—as Trump continues to deport immigrants in highly publicized spaces—leaves DACAmented immigrants in a liminal space. Not surprisingly, the discourse both by and about DACAmented im migrants is laden with fear and despair. Sofia De la Vega, an EMT student, states, “I will be deported and eventually, left with nothing to live for. I pray for an opportunity and to stop feeling like there isn’t any room for me here” (“American Dreamers”). Rodriguez recalls the life she lived before DACA, “under the notion of fear and uncertainty.” She continues, “Dreamers like me kept their dreams and secured them in a box called ‘limitations’” (“American Dreamers”). In other words, DACA allowed Rodriguez the opportunity to pursue higher education, obtain a job, and feel secure (even if temporarily): “I was free from the fear of deportation and that enabled me to gain confidence in my abili ties” (“American Dreamers”). A common cultural anecdote is that fear makes one fight or flee—but fear can also make one stop. Moreover, fear in the context of these personal stories emerges as a hindrance to acquiring any social capital or mobility. The ticking clock toward the DACA renewal period seemingly locks DACAmented immigrants into fear—it emerges in the narratives as all-encompassing, even perhaps all-defining. Indeed, across the accounts, fear emerges as constitutive. That is, fear names the DACAmented, mak ing them “illegal.” For Vianey Romery, a social worker from the Bronx in New York, the fear takes over: “Every two years I renew my DACA with the anxiety that it could end … the fear of it all ending has become an overwhelming state of mind.” In other comments, what emerges is the sense that for the DACAmented, their very ways of being, even of existing, have changed. For instance, Deyanira, a student from Austin, Texas, explains, “we would have to return to the shadows and live life in constant fear” (“American Dreamers”). Other DACAmented immigrants like Ari are recent home owners who have started their own businesses. Ari notes “the fear of losing everything I have is real, the fear of getting deported to a country I don’t know is real” (“American Dreamers”). In these tales, DACAmented immigrants emerge as consumed by fear and jeopardy. Put with Ehlers (2012) arguments on race, effect, and affect, such discourses reveal the racialization. To live in deportability is to live in fear, to be shaped and surfaced by fear. Race becomes fear. To be 210 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez brown is to be afraid. “Brown feelings,” Muñoz (2006) reminds us, “are not individualized affective particularity … they more nearly express … a larger collective mapping of self and other” (p. 679, emphasis added). In this collective mapping, the significance of stoppage is particularly crucial. Fear expressed, as it in in these narratives—as the fear to move, as the experience of being frozen, stilled—is the mapping that quite literally prevents the brown body from extending into the space of the social. Fear of moving contains individuals, literally locking them in to place as it also then contains them. Consider that constant message to raced bodies— stay in your place. A teacher from San Antonio, Texas, Julia Verzbickis, explains, “knowing that I could lose all the freedom I’ve gained is a paralyzing fear” (“American Dreamers”). Another account, detailing the experiences of “Mark,” notes that “he did not feel safe venturing out of the neighborhood, terrified that he would be randomly asked by police for identification that he did not have” (Bruk, 2017). Elsewhere, a teacher told the Huffington Post, “What we’re seeing is a lot of parents who used to pick up their children from school and now they’re sending them on the bus … the parents are afraid to come to school” (quoted in Planas & Carro, 2017). The parents are afraid to move. To move risks being found. Movement increases one’s deportability. Intersecting with these articulations of fear in the discourse are the accounts of surveillance, the naming of raids and arrests. In these frames, we see most vividly the constitutive force of stoppage. Because applications for DACA require that individuals name themselves as un documented and provide their contact information, circulating in the accounts are accounts of being tracked and found (Branson-Potts, 2017; Hetrick, 2017; Villazor, 2017). For instance, immigration attorney Reaz Jafri, reflecting on the responses of the DACAmented immigrants he works with, recounted “They’re wondering, ‘Now that I’m no longer protected, can ICE now come and find me? Because ICE now knows where I live, where I work’” (Mark, 2017). Betty refused to give her name to the reporter writing the story “because she’s afraid she’ll be found and deported” (Bermudez, 2017). Deportability consumes. If we think this stoppage with De Genova (2010) argument that the freedom of movement is core to what it means to be human, the affective containment of brown bodies is not just a fear of being deported, it is an act of abjection (pp. 57–59). What emerges is the clear disciplinary force of stoppage. De Genova (2004) makes clear that the deportation regime works by managing individuals, making them “illegal.” The notion of “stoppage” can thus be thought alongside the enactment of “stop and frisk” by police officers or a general call to “freeze.” Stop and frisk, we know, is a racialized practice, a “technology of racism” that is extended by “practices of indefinite detention” or in this case, the near- continuous potential for deportation (Ahmed, 2006, p. 140). Stop page then is both a political economy and an affective one. It “leaves its impressions” upon those bodies that are stopped and those empowered to call Stop! (Ahmed, 2006, p. 140). The difference between a “stop and frisk” and the fear of stoppage that immigrants are facing in our contemporary political sphere is that racialized stoppage linked with the possibility of deportation causes one to stop themselves (i.e., limit their public visibility) before being stopped by the authorities. Being stopped is to make the body a site of social stress (Ahmed, 2006, p. 140), but it is also to make an immigrants body highly publicized as criminal, as outsider, as “other.” Publicized cases of detention, raids, arrests, and deportations, attention to sanctuary, and even articulations of fear cir culate in this economy, accumulating the energies of fear and impressing upon those who may be wondering “Am I next?” Whither Whiteness amid Deportability? We live in the deportation regime. The intensity of that regime was made nationally visible in September 2017, when the Trump administration an nounced the end of DACA. In the days and months that followed, DACA became almost a household topic. Even those unfamiliar or removed entered the conversation. Protests and boycotts, calls for lawsuits, and sanctuary announced loudly—this is immoral, this is unnecessary. Such protests and outcries have raised national awareness, even potentially pushing on the boundaries of national belonging with the claims that the DACAmented are almost as American as are citizens. At the same time, the spectacle of DACA has recycled the affective inten sities of whiteness. We have traced here two rhetorical modes of racializa tion across the discourse surrounding DACA, pawnability and stoppage. Without a doubt, the outpouring of support for DACAmented immigrants is significant. If DACA continues, the 800,000 or so DACAmented will be able to move through their lives more easily, and that movement, both literal and figurative, will help to locate the DACAmented more, possibly even within the imaginaries of nation and whiteness. We want to be very clear that our analysis does not discount the dreams, goals, and hopes of many DACAmented immigrants, but rather seeks to contextualize the controversy of DACA within a discourse of racialization—one that also has deleterious a/effects on non-DACAmented immigrants. We cannot help but pause on the rhetorical significance of support, for in many ways the spectacle surrounding DACA and the deportability of DACAmented immigrants promulgates the stoppage of race. Immigrants, as well as brown bodies more generally, are fixed ever more forcibly into the good/bad divide. The rhetoric of “good” immigrants is mapped securely on to the bodies of DACAmented immigrants. However, the mapping of “bad” immigrants is insecure; it floats and moves, shadow ing brown bodies, who become, again and again, racialized immigrant bodies—labeled criminal, threatening, disposable. 212 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez Just as DACAmented immigrants, named special, deserving, and even American, are oriented in this discourse toward whiteness, their very towardness forces the orientation of undocumented immigrants back to ward criminality, undeserving, and illegality. In this moment, as we await decision on DACA what has been vividly clear is that the DACAmented are pawns whose values lies in their exchangeability. We can—and likely will—trade them for immigration reform, greater surveillance, a wall. But the trade value of the DACAmented does not end there. Instead, the discourses of support and goodness marshal detest and disgust. We trade our love and support for the right to greater animosity, and we do so in the love of nation. That is, DACAmented immigrants become pawns that restore our faith in our tales of our nation as welcoming of (some) immigrants, and this faith allows us to deport and detain guilt free. As Ahmed (2004a) reminds us, when we align in love, we are also aligning in hate. We “love” our country as we hate those who threaten it. While pawnability racializes immigrants back into criminality and deportability, so too does stoppage racialize. As we traced across the discourse, the spectacle surrounding DACA intensified the already-hostile national climate of intensity. layered across the voices of DACAmented immigrants. More precisely, what we hear is the fear of moving and that fear stops. For many, the stoppage is literal— individuals are afraid to be seen, afraid to go out, afraid of being de tained and deported. So too do we see stoppage embedded across the larger representations of DACA, whether voiced in concerns that all DACA applications increase the vulnerability of DACAmented or in accounts of raids and arrests. When Ahmed (2006) attends to stoppage, she argues that the free dom of bodily movement is already racialized. White bodies extend, non-White contract, White bodies connect to the social, and non-White bodies are abjected. Deportation is, of course, an extreme form of stoppage—non-White bodies are not just abjected, and their abjection prompts their physical rejection. They are removed from the body of the social. We are reminded, as well, of De Genova’s (2004) comments on the discursive force of deportability: deportability is decisive in the legal production of Mexican/migrant ‘illegality’ and the militarized policing of the U.S.-Mexico border, however, only insofar as some are deported in order that most may ultimately remain (un-deported) – as workers, whose particular mi grant status has been rendered ‘illegal’. (p. 161) Deportability stops—individuals don’t move. Raced into “deportabil ity,” and thus into “illegality,” they are thus (re)made into ideal—at least in terms of their ideal exploitability as workers. Taken together, the strategies of pawnability and stoppage that per vade the discourses surrounding DACA and DACAmented immigrants tell us much about the contemporary workings of whiteness. Indeed, we suggest that the discourses surrounding DACA are deeply consequential. Whiteness is materialized on the bodies of some, its perpetual allure—the dream of safety, freedom, mobility—cast as attainable just as its absolute rigidity—the nightmare that yet again raced bodies are cast into fear and vulnerability—is made clear. When we think about the spectacle created in Trump’s announcement of the end, what emerges is a case of strange bedfellows. Pawnability and stoppage, support and fear, welcome and rejection intersect into what we think of as the power—and nightmare— of whiteness. Whiteness, Ahmed (2007) argues, functions as a kind of “public comfort,” a mode of being at ease—and at home—in the world (p. 158). But that ease is premised on the dis-ease. What we see at play in pawnability and stoppage are two modes of seemingly discordant racial ization. One appears to be both embraced and stopped. But what if the embrace is its own moment of stoppage; one is embraced that that race can be stopped. This, we fear, is the racialization of deportability.