Patrisia Macías-Rojas

Patrisia Macías-Rojas serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where her research critically examines the criminalization of immigration through the lens of race, border politics, and criminal justice system convergence. Her work documents how post-civil rights era policies transformed deportation into a carceral process, impacting border communities and enforcement agencies.

Education:

• PhD in Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

Macías-Rojas' scholarship centers on three interconnected pillars: race and immigration after civil rights, global racial politics of border controls, and the institutional merger of immigration enforcement with criminal legal systems. Utilizing ethnographic and comparative historical methodologies, her research reveals how civil rights frameworks paradoxically enabled punitive migration control while reshaping Border Patrol practices and community experiences in Latina/o border regions. This analytical approach bridges theoretical traditions in political sociology, critical race studies, and punishment sociology.

Analysis of her publications (2016-2021) demonstrates consistent focus on detention infrastructure, enforcement discretion, and historical policy shifts, particularly regarding the 1996 immigration reforms. Her work systematically connects micro-level border security practices to macro-level systems of racialized control, spanning disciplines including criminology, migration studies, and political theory with recurring emphasis on spatial dynamics of confinement.

Scientific Awards:

• 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities for "From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America"

Macías-Rojas mentors graduate students in race, migration, and border studies while leading innovative research projects. Her current investigations examine pandemic-era bed space politics across prisons and hospitals, analyzing how infrastructure capacity dictates resource allocation and human treatment. Complementing this, her historical study of right-wing populism explores strategic mobilization of immigration issues within racialized political movements, building on prior work regarding Democratic Party immigration politics and domestic-police convergence at borders.