Targeted

Every year the American Dream inspires hundreds of thousands of people to risk their savings—and their lives—to enter the United States in search of a better life. Increasingly, instead of finding their dream, many encounter a nightmare—a country whose culture and legal system aggressively target and prosecute them.

In Targeted, journalist Deepa Fernandes seamlessly weaves together history, political analysis, and first-person narratives of those caught in the grips of the increasingly Kafkaesque US Homeland Security system: immigrants, non-citizens and undocumented workers. Deepa—herself an immigrant well-acquainted with US immigration procedures—takes the reader on a harrowing journey inside the new American immigrant experience, a journey marked by militarized border zones, racist profiling, criminalization, and detention.

Fernandes argues that since 9/11 the Bush administration has been carrying out a series of systematic changes to decades-old immigration policy that simultaneously constitute a roll back of immigrant rights and a boon for a growing “Immigration Industrial Complex.” She also documents the bullet-to-ballot strategy of white supremacist elements that have successfully infiltrated and influenced the writing of the country’s immigration legislation.

Deepa Fernandes is a radio journalist for Pacifica Radio whose award-winning work has aired on the BBC World Service, and National Public Radio. Her writing has appeared in the Village Voice, In These Times and the New York Amsterdam News. Targeted, her first book, is the result of four years of research collecting narratives from immigrants as well as human rights groups and lawyers who are challenging the Bush administrations policies.