Journal of Transnational American Studies

Citing contemporary examples of Southeast Asian police officers within the refugee dia­spora, this essay traces a genealogy of “refugee cops” as they emerged vis-à-vis increased criminalization of growing Southeast Asian communities in the resettlement context. Locating their emergence from a deeper historical lineage of indigène officer cul­tivation across French Indochina and American Cold War inter­vention in the trans­pacific circuit between Southeast Asia and the United States, the genealogy weaves crit­i­cal refugee studies’s accounts of the refugee as key to understanding international relations into a political economic arc across the timeline of racial capitalism to ulti­mately discuss what I term the refugee carceral condition. Southeast Asian cops, from this view, emerged from racial capitalism’s ongoing carceral reliance on confine­ment and the operation of sites that normalize “bare life” to securitize racialized space for the purposes of dispossession, exploitation, accumulation, and disposal. Closing by turning to the writings of Cedric Robinson and H. L. T. Quan to help imagine old and new refugee ways of living and being free beyond carceral imperialism, the essay ends by taking up the notion of preserving the ontological totality as has been elaborated in the Black Radical Tradition, considering how an embrace of refugee ontological wholeness might work to dematerialize and divest from the global prison-border appar­atus.