Angie Bautista-Chavez, Johns Hopkins University

Presentation Title: A Rapid Path to Bureaucratic Autonomy: Exploiting Transnational and Racial Hierarchies

About the Presentation

While post-9/11 elected officials fixated on bolstering the U.S. southwestern border, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security expanded far beyond it. Drawing on interviews with U.S. and Mexican executive officials, field observations in Mexico, and a transnational archive of presidential, legislative, bureaucratic, and news media documents, I show that the DHS, acting in its own interests, repeatedly made policy ahead of presidential directives and outside legislative mandates, independently building a system of extraterritorial administration that extended its authority across Mexican territory. Contrary to expectations in the bureaucratic politics literature, I show that transnational and racial hierarchies — not a positive reputation grounded in expertise and legitimacy — enabled the DHS to rapidly achieve bureaucratic autonomy. By the time Donald J. Trump was first elected, the DHS had already transformed itself from a domestic to a transnational bureaucracy with foreign governing capabilities.

About the Speaker

Dr. Angie Bautista-Chavez is the Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. In her book project, Exporting Borders, she connects post-9/11 U.S. border externalization to developments in the American imperial state, explaining how Mexican institutions were systematically integrated into active yet subordinate roles under U.S. federal command to administer the mass removal of people from north to south. Bautista-Chavez also co-leads an academia-community-practitioner research collective that is mapping and explaining the historical development and current activation of 1,400+ Latino organizations across the United States. Bautista-Chavez earned her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2020 and served as an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University from 2021 to 2024.

Seminar Format:

Location IN PERSON: 2208 LeFrak Hall. We are requesting advanced registration so that we can track capacity.  Please use this link to RSVP for in-person attendance.

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Zoom registration link.  Upon registration, you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar

If accommodations are needed, please send a request to the meeting organizer (mprc-support@umd.edu) at least 72 hours prior to the event, if possible, to allow time to discuss and implement alternatives.