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Abstract
This thesis explores how immigration law in the United States operates as an affective regime that produces and sustains racialized “problem bodies” through legal rhetoric, visual iconography, and state-sponsored spectacle. Drawing on affect theory and José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “brownness,” I investigate how fear, anxiety, and affective alienation are mobilized to justify exclusionary policies with particular attention to Senate Bill 1070 in the State of Arizona and the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Through close readings of legal texts, media representations, and White House propaganda, I argue that immigration law is not merely a set of rules, but a cultural and emotional project that infrastructures collective feelings to naturalize socio-legal exclusion. By centering the affective and communal dimensions of brownness, this thesis offers a new framework for understanding both the corporeal violence and the bodily affective structures that impact contemporary immigration politics.