Abstract
As moral panic over immigrants spread during the early 1990s, immigration policies became increasingly criminalized in the wake of the bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993 and o fthe Murrah Federal Building in OklahomaCity in 1995. In response to the threat o fterrorism at home, Congress enacted theIllegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act along with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. Since then several key provisions of those statutes have produced numerous violations of civil liberties and immigrants' rights. Drawing on a conceptual framework developed by sociologist Gary T. Marx (1981), this article examines critically the contradictions and ironies of immigration control, specifically the most controversial aspects of the 1996 laws:court-stripping provisions, use of secret evidence, and growing register of deportable crimes. In light of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001,the article expresses concerns over the government's current campaign to fight terrorism, especially the use of racial profiling and mass detention shrouded in secrecy.