On a Personal Note: My Behind-the-Scenes Interview with La Cuenta
Source: Austin Kocher. July 20 2025
My decision to avoid interjecting my personal story into my writing on Substack derives from a commitment to keeping the focus of my work on the research rather than on myself. As much as I love stories, I do not gravitate to overly self-referential writing that twists a healthy call for reflexivity into a distracting mishmash of memoir and analysis that neither respects nor advances either genre. I am not skittish about taking ethical positions that reflect my values, provided that I have evidence and a rational basis for such positions. But generally I prefer to stay out of the way—not out of a lack of reflexivity, but as a result of my own sincere engagement with this writerly problematic.
Apprehension is not prohibition, however, which is why I hope you will permit me to share with you this two-part interview with Antero Garcia at La Cuenta. When Antero first contacted me, I assumed we would focus on immigration data. But Antero, a Stanford professor and skilled interviewer, led the conversation through the thicket of my academic background and personal experiences to tell the story not only of what I do but why I do it. We discuss how my training as a geographer continues to shape my thinking, how my military service influenced my research on immigration enforcement, and why I believe—perhaps deeper than I believe anything—that working class Americans and immigrants need to see each other as allies, not adversaries, in the struggle for economic justice.
I am grateful to Antero and La Cuenta for generously publishing both parts of the thorough interview this week. I invite you to read both parts at the links below, then to explore La Cuenta’s many other moving stories. La Cuenta’s goal is to offer individual stories and perspectives about the costs of undocumented living in the U.S., primarily from the perspective of current and formerly undocumented individuals as well as members of mixed-status families. If you would like to contribute to La Cuenta, please read their call for contributions.
Read my two-part interview with La Cuenta at the links below:
- Part 1: “At the core of immigration enforcement is a question: who belongs where?”
- Part 2: “There are commonalities that we overlook because our ideas about documentedness and citizenship and race cloud our vision to seeing the ways in which we actually share and we struggle together.”
PART I
“At the core of immigration enforcement is a question: who belongs where?”
Austin Kocher shares how he unpacks systems of immigration for the general public.
Even before Trump returned to office, Dr. Austin Kocher has been helping explain and dive deeper into the immigration policies and enforcement efforts shaping the United States. As an Assistant Research Professor at Syracuse University and through his widely read Substack, Dr. Kocher’s offered level-headed explanations of how this country’s immigration apparatus operates.
In this first half of our conversation, Dr. Kocher talks about how his work as a geographer shapes his understanding of current immigration contexts.
ANTERO GARCIA: In broad terms, can you describe the work you do?
AUSTIN KOCHER: I'm a geographer, first and foremost, and I study the immigration enforcement system, everything from the first time that an individual comes into contact with law enforcement or immigration enforcement of some kind all the way through the end of that process.
A lot of that work over the last 15 years has been very qualitative. I've interviewed a lot of law enforcement. I tend to study systems that affect people, as opposed to the people themselves. That's partly because I think that's work I'm better qualified for.
It's also part of a theoretical and a methodological framework as a political geographer specifically that we tend to be more interested in studying and critiquing systems of power and marginalization, rather than studying the people who are themselves marginalized. There's a whole ethics around where we should put our research gaze.
So, I'm really focused on understanding and critiquing the state. And that means that commitment did not begin as a commitment to doing quantitative work or to looking at data. But I stumbled into it because, actually, it turns out that understanding the data that's held in government databases, not only provides a really unique and very granular insight into how these systems work and who is affected, but actually understanding the systems themselves helps us to think critically about the kinds of knowledge that the state is producing about immigrants.
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“Understanding the systems themselves helps us to think critically about the kinds of knowledge that the state is producing about immigrants.”
AG: People often think of geography as this archaic topic – paper maps and way-finding. Can you describe how digital systems are defining or shaping immigration right now?
AK: Geography is one of these old school social sciences. Very few people get a job as a geographer, strictly speaking. It's much more a theoretical framework and methods training that you sort of combine with themes or particular topics, and mine just happens to be immigration.
So, from that perspective, geography has this very critical, in some ways, very radical intellectual history, even among the social sciences. Questioning systems of power is just core to a lot of what we do. Historically, if we think about political geography 2000 years ago, it's asking the literal question of who has the high ground? Who has more troops? Who knows the landscape and the culture, classical, territorial battles over land? We're seeing that unfold in Eastern Europe with the war between Ukraine and Russia. We're seeing in a really terrifying way, a similar thing happening in the Hamas-Israel war that's been going on now.
But these similar kinds of things are unfolding in virtual spaces. It shapes how we think about space. It shapes who belongs to certain spaces. So even immigration policy, the reason that immigration policy is so interesting to political geographers is at the base, at the core of the immigration enforcement is a question of who belongs where.
That's all immigration is: who belongs where? And that's a fundamentally geographic question. And the way that this question is getting answered is increasingly not just about physical places and spaces, but also about virtual spaces. In many ways, the enforcement apparatus is encroaching deeper and deeper into people's everyday digital spaces. So as a US citizen, when I'm coming back across the border, I need to be mindful about what's on my smartphone because the kinds of protections that we imagine that we have in other places don't apply in the same way.
Similarly, there's new policy that effectively requires any immigrants applying for benefits of any kind, they have to turn over all of their social media and online handles to the US government. We understand digital spaces as a mix of public and private, they are being investigated in these processes. I try to use these examples because people tend to go to think of surveillance as things like drones. That is also there, but surveillance happens in really subtle ways as well.
AG: That makes sense. I am also thinking about how things like the use of the Alien Invasion Act is pulling immigration processes back in an older direction, too. Archaic forms of xenophobia and control—the “high ground” example—are being enacted today too.
AK: Absolutely. A lot of us in the political geography world have spent the last maybe 50 years of the discipline trying to understand all of the very nuanced way that society is controlled through spatial mechanisms of access and exclusion and all of these really subtle things. Even if you've been in a major city in the last 10 years, you've seen these park benches that are effectively anti-homeless designs that won't allow people to lay down, and that's a way of controlling access to space. It's kind of subtle in some ways, but it's remarkable the ways in which the Trump administration has, as you said, essentially just gone old school. They're not even trying to hide it. It's like revolutionary France. Literally, Trump tweeted a quote from Napoleon III about “He who saves his Country doest not violate any Law.” So yes, we've retrogressed in that way.
“It's remarkable the ways in which the Trump administration has essentially just gone old school. They're not even trying to hide it. It's like revolutionary France.”
AG: So maybe a very obvious question, but of all the things you could study, why immigration?
AK: I got into this in 2008 or 2009. At that time, there was this immigration policy, which is now being remobilized called 287(g). 287(g), as I'm sure you know, was a really unique policy in the late second Bush administration that allowed local law enforcement to do immigration enforcement. And that came out at a time when I was sort of coming of age and getting more involved in community issues and saw this as a problem. Something that most people probably don't know is that I was in the Navy right after high school. I spent four years in the Navy and I was doing law enforcement work in the Navy. I was a law enforcement officer of all things.
AK: In Puerto Rico.
AG: Whoa.
AK: Yeah, during 9/11. And I came out of that experience because of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, because of the post 9/11 landscape. I was very young. I didn't know what I was doing. For me, it was a real awakening. And actually there's a lot of veterans from that period who living through that period kind of really went the other way and really questioned the US foreign policy. I was interested in how I could use my experience in the military and as a law enforcement officer, how do I use that experience for good in some way? When 287(g) came out and I had an opportunity to go to graduate school and do research, I thought, "Oh, this is great, because who's going to have better access to interviewing law enforcement officers than a guy that looks like me with a short haircut and is a veteran and was a cop." I was able to leverage that experience to interview a lot of people, and I had enough background knowledge to already kind of understood the basics of policing so I could sort of get into questions and I think people trusted me to talk about that. It sort of just took off from there. I love the research. I love being a part of a community. I mean it’s also volatile, it's heartbreaking every single day, and yet it's urgent, it's important.
Some people drive towards happiness and some people drive towards purpose. And sometimes being happy isn't always purposeful and sometimes being purposeful isn't happy all the time. I'm a purposeful person.
AG: Did you expect your research and your Substack to get the kind of visibility it's getting now?
AK: I definitely didn't expect where it's gone. That is a huge surprise. I started it partly because I'm a little bit of a technophile. If there's something new out there, I like to understand it. I never want to be so far behind the way that technology is going and I don't ever want to be too far behind on where digital culture is going. So when it started out, it felt good to have something between social media and peer review academic journals that could be a little bit more thoughtful.
AG: Yeah, you don’t have to wait two years for your work to come out.
AK: You don't have to wait. It's the timeline, you know that. If you want to say something, how do you say it? I mean, you used to be able to tweet it or to make a Twitter thread, and that was incredible, that was really my first experience with having research take off was Twitter. But then once Musk bought Twitter, I said, "Oh, I want to have something that I own or that I control. I don't trust these platforms anymore. It could all go away tomorrow, and you just lose all of it." So that's when I sort of leaned into it.
PART II
“There are commonalities that we overlook because our ideas about documentedness and citizenship and race cloud our vision to seeing the ways in which we actually share and we struggle together.”
Austin Kocher describes the human costs behind today’s deportation data.
Just days after Dr. Austin Kocher described the inconsistency between Trump’s immigration rhetoric and the realities of his actions, those inconsistencies were shattered. Images of armed and masked federal agents taking individuals in unmarked cars were not yet a common occurrence on our social media feeds. And while Dr. Kocher’s description of his process of tracking ICE data was offered before the rapid escalation of ICE activities in June, the fundamental points of his work are perhaps even more relevant today.
Ultimately, this second half of our conversation illuminates how to interpret the tools and activities of the U.S. immigration system. More importantly, Kocher’s work reflects the ways these systems impact individuals and families every day.
ANTERO GARCIA: You’ve been diving into the actual numbers behind deportation and detention. Until recently, those numbers have been surprising to me each time you dive in. From your perspective, what kinds of trends have you been seeing?
AUSTIN KOCHER: It’s very tricky. In the immigration space, we kind of have this trade-off. If you want to get good data about immigration, you can either get relatively recent data that the agency puts out to the public, or you get really good data through public records requests that takes 12 to 36 months. As a researcher, if it takes two years to publish something, you just don't care that much about what's super, super current. However, once I started talking to journalists and started writing for a more public audience, people want to know what's going on now. So what I've had to do is to figure out what are the data sources that are up-to-date and write about those and then also write in a more detailed way about other data that I'm getting to use on a more academic timeline.
Congress requires ICE to release data on immigrant detention about every two weeks. And having worked with that data for three years now, I feel pretty comfortable that I've followed it over time and I've noticed enough of where the mistakes are--sometimes they make mistakes when they release the data. So I know what to look for, I know how to validate it. Sometimes there's periods where there's not a lot of change so I just try to keep people up to date with it.
AG: Unless I'm misinterpreting what you’ve been writing, a lot of the data isn’t nearly to the degree of what Trump has claimed to do. Maybe a week from now, this could all be completely different, but is that interpretation right?
AK: Yeah, that's exactly a correct way to characterize it. Right after Trump won the election, I wrote this post that basically said, "Look, here's what we're going to see. There's going to be three words that characterize this Trump administration: volatility, hypocrisy, and cruelty." Those have played out. And one of the ways that they've played out is that Trump, as we know, is very invested in images and headlines and far more interested in stories that circulate widely regardless of whether or not they're true. And that's a lot of how the White House is thinking about measuring their effectiveness. It just doesn't always match up with reality.
I always try to balance how I share the data. I don't want people to look at what I'm reading and think I'm saying, everything's fine. It's really bad for a lot of people. It just is.
As a writer, how do I communicate in a way that's clear and digestible to people who aren't trained in academic writing? How do I balance the writing with acknowledging people's real experiences? I want someone to be able to hand my posts off to a family member who is a little skeptical, who's maybe a little Trumpy, and to be able to read it and go, "Okay, maybe I don't agree with everything, but I trust this person enough that I'll keep reading."
AG: Let’s pivot to the human consequences of this data. This site is called La Cuenta to reflect the hidden costs to being undocumented in this country. And so if we could create a bill of the invisible costs of surviving while being labeled undocumented in this country, what costs does your work demonstrate?
AK: That's a fantastic question. So, while I was getting my PhD, I started and ran a worker center for a little while. We were working a lot with questions of wage theft and for me it was a real opportunity to advocate, but also just to be witness to these things. I grew up with a single mom with four kids. A good part of my youth was we just didn't have much. And I saw my own mother doing the best that she could to make ends meet to, you iron for friends, or you do laundry, you clean houses, or whatever it takes to try to keep your family together, and to raise kids.
And that's all a lot of working people are doing, including immigrants, including undocumented folks. There's a lot in common between what my mom did to try to raise her kids and what undocumented parents and moms are doing for their kids. I mean, we're trying to survive in capitalism and we're trying to make ends meet and we're trying not to get sick. We're trying not to miss days at work because we don't have healthcare, all this stuff.
I guess in some ways, one of the messages that I like to try to communicate is how there are experiences that are very unique to undocumented people. There's vulnerabilities that I will never understand. And there are commonalities that we overlook because our ideas about documentedness and citizenship and race cloud our vision to seeing the ways in which we actually share and we struggle together.
“There's a lot in common between what my mom did to try to raise her kids and what undocumented parents and moms are doing for their kids.”
AG: That’s so powerful.
AK: There is another part of that answer, which is sort of less personal, which is related to people who are facing deportation in court. So there's 4 million people right now, potentially more, who have pending deportation cases. They're just waiting to find out if a judge is going to order them deported. And I started theorizing this when I was doing my graduate research on the immigration courts and really thinking about what it means to be in this removal proceedings population because there's this invisible price. There's actually a very real price to paying for an attorney, going to immigration court, taking a day off work, all that stuff that's difficult to do. But there's also this invisible toll, this invisible cost of just living in limbo for 2 to 10 years.
And so when I've talked to friends or I've talked to people I've interviewed, it's like, do we buy a house? Do I buy a car? Do I send my kids to a good school? Are my kids going to be able to finish school in the United States? What happens if we get ordered deported and my son is a junior in high school? He now has to leave his friend. Am I going to leave my son here if he's a citizen or if he can stay? And so there's all these kinds of, these constant, you can never settle. You're constantly, even if you have settled, even if you're staying put in a way, our system forces people to always be perpetually on the move or always ready to move. And it's like you're living out a suitcase your whole life, even if you have the same apartment.
“There's actually a very real price to paying for an attorney, going to immigration court, taking a day off work, all that stuff that's difficult to do. But there's also this invisible toll, this invisible cost of just living in limbo for 2 to 10 years.”
AG: That's a great context. You basically spend this time wondering if you will be deemed worthy in the eyes of the state. Which in and of itself is a fraught context.
AK: Absolutely. And it does open up a little bit because I've done some research on deportation defense campaigns and sanctuary church acts. One of the things that's interesting is the way that the state operates and its moral or lack of moral compass. There's a lot of opportunity for us, as people who aren't in these agencies, to remind the public that we don't actually have to share the same moral and ethical framework that the state's imposing. And maybe the louder that we are, the more it highlights the dissonance between what the government's trying to do in our name as citizens and what we actually believe.
“Maybe the louder that we are, the more it highlights the dissonance between what the government's trying to do in our name as citizens and what we actually believe.”
