Philadelphia as borderland: crimmigration, resistencia and local power

This dissertation examines how immigrant justice organizing in Philadelphia operates across multiple scales and reshapes the city’s spatial and political landscape. Drawing on crimmigration, feminist geopolitics, and Latinx geographies, it argues that immigration enforcement is not only a national issue but also a local, lived process that reorganizes everyday life, urban space and authority. Using qualitative methods, including interviews, participant observation, and policy analysis, this study traces how federal immigration policies are interpreted and contested at the city level. It shows that Philadelphia’s sanctuary policies act as both protective measures and sites of tension, revealing the limits and possibilities of local resistance within broader carceral systems. The findings demonstrate that immigrant justice organizing connects national campaigns to local strategies such as policy advocacy, coalition-building, direct action and grassroots organizing and activism, highlighting scale as a strategic tool. This research illustrates how fear of deportation shapes access to healthcare, labor protections and safety, while also documenting everyday practices of grassroots organizing, activism, resistance and care. These practices underscore feminist geopolitical insights into power as relational and contested in daily life. This dissertation contributes to carceral geographies by extending crimmigration into urban spatial analysis, to Latinx geographies by foregrounding place-based experiences and grassroots organizing, and to abolition geographies by highlighting grassroots resistance to systems of surveillance and exclusion. It argues that understanding local dynamics of grassroots organizing, activism, and resistance is essential for developing more just and equitable approaches to immigration policy.