Excerpt from “What’s Really Happening With Immigration,” by Delan Bruce, published in UCLA Magazine on October 6, 2026. View the original story.
By Delan Bruce | Illustrations by Lyne Lucien
Ananya Roy, a UCLA professor of urban planning, social welfare, and geography since 2015, bemoans this unsure, ever-changing legal environment. “In Los Angeles, this has felt as if our communities are under occupation,” says the former director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. “These changing rules and laws are being applied not only to those whose immigration status is up in the air, but also those who thought they had secure status — green card holders, folks on H-1B1 visas.”
Roy knows this world well; her partner’s family fled violence in El Salvador and sought asylum in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Women of the family journeyed on westbound buses from the east side of the city to clean Malibu mansions. They tell stories of la migra stopping and boarding those buses in search of hardworking people like them who came to this country with a simple, powerful ambition: to make a life for themselves in relative peace and safety.
Roy sees the fact that birthright citizenship is now coming into question as white nationalism taking hold through the law. In such conditions, she says, fierce legal contestation, undertaken by the likes of Arulanantham and his UCLA Law colleagues, is vitally important.
Although not a historian, Roy can’t help but notice that the history of the legal battles over the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s courtroom disputes. At stake are the definitions of legal personhood. And the limits of federal authority.
Read the full story in UCLA Magazine.
