The Deportation Research Clinic as Scholarly Praxis

As its website, originally designed and maintained by the Buffett Institute’s Krzystof Kozbuzki, states, the Clinic

• Studies the misconduct of federal, state, and local agencies implementing deportation laws. Working with a global network of U.S. residents who have been issued deportation orders, as well as with attorneys, law professors, journalists, policy-makers, and students, the Deportation Research Clinic:

• Uncovers, investigates, and analyzes geographical and policy “hot spots” of misconduct among law enforcement agencies implementing deportation laws;

• Works with communities in Illinois and beyond to discover and test new legal, political, and economic strategies to prevent and ameliorate the harms U.S. residents endure because of misconduct by government officials during deportation proceedings;

• Has special expertise on the unlawful detention and deportation of U.S. citizens and the unlawful dollar-per-day wages paid to U.S. residents in custody under immigration laws.

In brief, respondents who encounter misconduct, their attorneys, or family members contact us and we track responses of information, publicity, and law, much of which are provided by other legal or media professionals whom we alert about these cases, and then we publish what we learn. ^{Footnote 5} The substantive foci dramatize insights from more theoretical work. Deporting U.S. citizens as aliens highlights the contingencies of national identity, the fragility of rights for respondents in deportation proceedings, and the incoherence of the nation-state. ^{Footnote 6} Paying immigrant labor one dollar per day in the name of a policy for protecting labor markets reveals the opportunism of immigration detention policies and the prison industry behind them. ^{Footnote 7}

Some may wonder why this is for political scientists and not other academics, or how this is scholarship and not activism. While many communities of scholars may be moved by injustice, it is the ability to develop and use intelligence of theory, history, and contemporary information specific to injustices of politics, law, and government that renders this topic suitable to deeper inquiry by those who study these matters as their vocation, and not scholars in other fields or citizens who care about the state. The purpose of iterative research of the sort undertaken through the Deportation Research Clinic is to attend to the knots in law: to notice where they lie, how they develop, and how they affect other sites and events, and to ease the kinks or create new pathways, not to make the law perfect, but to attend to the spasms that create injustice, and then to observe the effects of interventions intended to lessen this injustice. ^{Footnote 8}

The Clinic has no dedicated staff but receives ad hoc administrative support through the Buffett Institute. Our core team includes six undergraduate and two graduate students working together, along with faculty affiliates and collaborators at Northwestern and beyond, to obtain documents from the federal government, produce reports for the public and attorneys, and conduct research for scholarly publications. In addition, we host an annual student-initiated public event through the Buffett Institute. Funding is project specific and to date has drawn on resources internal to Northwestern. Sources have included the Sexuality Program at Northwestern ($28,000); the Political Science Department Farrell Fellows ($3,000 to $5,000 annually); and funding from the Residential College ($1,500). Other labor comes from student volunteers. Each year about a half-dozen students volunteer; their work is ad hoc and often task specific, e.g., transcribing a hearing recording. Other expenses are covered from my Northwestern discretionary funding, about $1,000 annually.

The Clinic work would not be possible without Andrew Free, a Nashville-based civil rights attorney with an unusual range and depth of legal expertise. Free represents the Clinic in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, and also has pursued lawsuits responsive to Clinic research findings, much of this pro bono. The federal government covers the FOIA litigation, per the FOIA statute authorizing fees if the Plaintiff “substantially prevails.” ^{Footnote 9} The Deportation Research Clinic also has ongoing collaborations with Samuel Tenenbaum, Clinical Law Professor, Northwestern Law School’s Bluhm Legal Clinic; Mark Fleming, Litigation Director, National Immigrant Justice Center; ^{Footnote 10} Daniel Kanstroom, Director, Boston College Law School Post-Deportation and Human Rights Project; and Andrea Saenz, Immigration Justice Clinic, Cardozo Law School. ^{Footnote 11}

The Clinic activities at present include projects at different stages of scholarship, litigation, and information production. These projects (described later) are all inspired by a forensic approach to political inquiry that places a premium on research that uses publications as well as lawsuits to critically expose unlawful operations of a U.S. deportation regime ^{Footnote 12} that typically protects its perpetrators by deporting the evidence of their malfeasance, including U.S. citizens whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has no legal authority to detain. ^{Footnote 13}

Forensic Intelligence

My decision to conceive of this work as a Deportation Research Clinic, rather than as a “project,” “center,” or other research vehicle more familiar to the social sciences, was shaped by my evolving reflection on three particularly important research experiences. First, for two decades I had been studying laws and political theories of membership since antiquity and was aware of how quickly intergenerational group differences instantiated by the state can erupt in systemic violence, including deportations. ^{Footnote 14} Second, in 2007 I was studying the controversial historiography of Latvian Jews from the early twentieth century through the post-Soviet period. ^{Footnote 15} Insights from political scientist Raul Hilberg’s three-volume masterpiece, The Destruction of the European Jews, alerted me to the consistency of grotesque and unlawful deportation operations amidst a chaos of written policies. ^{Footnote 16} Meanwhile, the spike in U.S. deportations (from 28,829 in 1988 to 174,813 in 1998 to 358,886 in 2008) ^{Footnote 17} and the violence, often unlawful, associated with this, prompted me to wonder if it might be possible to shorten the cycle of accountability by initiating processes of remediation and studying their possibilities and limits. ^{Footnote 18}

Third, and finally, the synechdochal relationship between individual and political bodies in political theory—e.g., Plato’s inquiries of justice in an individual taking the form of investigating its presence in a political society, or the Hobbesian sovereign, a singular entity embodying all of a society’s individuals—helped me see the relevance to political research of paradigmatic assumptions of public health. ^{Footnote 19} To respond to the individual medically and also politically entails understanding the larger groups in which we are embedded: to remedy individual symptoms of, say, asthma, entails the closing of a toxic incinerator near an elementary school, not the prescription of inhalers. The Research Clinic model embraces the approach public health scholars have used in addressing gun violence and even civil war, ^{Footnote 20} drawing on individual experiences to produce findings about unlawful state violence as suggestive of systemic, community-level etiologies and responses.

The work of the Deportation Research Clinic is linked to a growing body of work by scholars of politics that is occurring under the rubric of what I am calling forensic intelligence, ^{Footnote 21} a research framework that may address the questions, frustrations, and commitments among political scientists who have been struggling to work within the prevailing national intelligence paradigm, one in service of a state that prioritizes the existence of the nation over the rule of law and attempts to procure information appropriate to that end.

The most significant challenge to mainstream political science research today comes not from attacks on specific methods, but from problem-driven scholarship pursuing knowledge of the government and not its citizens. One version of this is the “policy-focused political science” ^{Footnote 22} that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson hope will supersede the priority now given to formal modeling and survey research. Hacker and Pierson, along with a growing number of scholars studying human rights, citizenship, migration, and governance, including regional and international courts and jurisdiction, are moving into subject areas largely uncharted by their dissertation advisers. Other examples include Ido Oren’s findings on the tendency of research on politics to produce “self-disconfirming analysis” ^{Footnote 23} and Charli Carpenter’s reflections on how her research publications on child refugees may affect outcomes and “undermine the scientific enterprise,” ^{Footnote 24} a risk she both credits and decides is outweighed by other values. And there are bold efforts that surpass entirely these positivist parameters, for instance, Bronwyn Leebaw’s problem-driven, cross-disciplinary work urging change in how international law addresses environmental war crimes, ^{Footnote 25} and Heather Johnson’s disavowal of neutrality in her research on migrant experiences: “I am part of the dialogue, and in recognizing my own precariousness and subjectivity and the ways in which my own perspective has changed I hope to remain a part of it in a way that is productive of positive change within the global migration and asylum regime.” ^{Footnote 26} The fact that some political scientists find current questions and methods inapposite for their research, and others have simply taken up new approaches and new questions altogether, provides evidence of important disciplinary rethinking of the goals, questions, and tactics for intelligent research. ^{Footnote 27}

To consider the contours of these changes requires moving away from debates about science, theory, and methods narrowly conceived, and regrouping to consider the primary goal of all research, including that on politics, law, and governance: intelligence. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, intelligence means “the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations.” ^{Footnote 28} Intelligence, not scientific objectivity, nor even knowledge per se, is the objective of all important thinking and analysis. The methods used in the natural sciences also are responsive to demands of intelligence and not valuable in themselves. To the extent that a certain method assists us in measuring and predicting the relatively stable physical world, techniques in service of that method serve intelligence. ^{Footnote 29} However, it is as sensible to believe that a method that works for measuring the galaxies will work for measuring people as it is to assume that because we can design cars to convert gas into energy we might create people so they could do so as well. There are neither logical nor metaphysical reasons, nor empirical evidence, to suggest that a technique used successfully in one domain will be the best choice of tool for intelligence about negotiating our existence in another.

The research clinic model for scholarship about politics and governance grasps that techniques of inquiry that depend on cumulative findings of political science provide just one pathway toward information instrumental to intelligence, and it prioritizes the ends of intelligence broadly considered over those of one version of science for its own sake. Indeed, much of political science in the twentieth century has been directed toward the goals of intelligence, more specifically national intelligence, which, as a paradigm for research entails an axiomatic belief in the existential priority of the nation as an enduring truth to which all other heuristics and research questions must be subordinated. (A corollary to this is the privileging of national security over all other needs or interests.) ^{Footnote 30} The national intelligence paradigm, broadly conceived, summons surveillance of the public’s attitudes, opinions, and behaviors, as well as party identifications and campaign trends, on behalf of government and elites who comprise the audience for, and are not the object of, academic inquiry. ^{Footnote 31}

At stake in this description is not a battle about methods per se, but intelligence values and objectives, and thus research priorities and audiences. As S.M. Amadae, ^{Footnote 32} Noam Chomsky, ^{Footnote 33} Philip Green, ^{Footnote 34} Chalmers Johnson, ^{Footnote 35} Michael Rogin, ^{Footnote 36} Ido Oren, ^{Footnote 37} Kenneth Osgood ^{Footnote 38} and Frances Saunders ^{Footnote 39} have pointed out, numerous academic luminaries have eschewed positivist frameworks and have presented findings instrumental to national intelligence that were at best biased and at worse crude lies on behalf of the military-industrial complex, effective in part because of hidden agendas, narrow interests, and delusional thinking dressed up as rationality.

The agendas based on the fantasy of a nation and its enemies persistently produce massive new grants, ^{Footnote 40} as well as advanced degree programs, the paranoia de jour being those for studying “homeland security.” ^{Footnote 41} Meanwhile, the government is not, for example, soliciting requests for proposals to study the numerous safety risks to its citizens posed by the private prison sector, the industry behind the appropriation Act requiring ICE to “maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds,” ^{Footnote 42} a law that leads ICE to use “bed availability” as a “risk factor” for individual custody decisions and produces many of the illegal government actions that the Clinic encounters. ^{Footnote 43}

The emergence of scholarship organized by principles of the research clinic and not distanced observations is thus not a move away from objectivity and toward activism, but rather, a move away from the heuristics and techniques of the national intelligence paradigm ^{Footnote 44} and toward other paradigms of political intelligence, especially forensic intelligence—what I am proposing as the most important resource for contemporary political inquiry. The national intelligence paradigm consists of concepts and techniques conducive to providing knowledge elicited by a national power elite, ^{Footnote 45} that is, CEOs, board directors, hedge fund managers, university and large non-profit foundation leadership, and government officials, especially those working for military and security agencies and their contractors. Much of the information they accumulate remains secret, thus creating a panopticon from which elites view foreign and domestic publics without our knowing the precise nature of this surveillance, who is conducting it, or its objectives.

Forensic intelligence reverses the direction of the telescope. ^{Footnote 46} Scholars accumulate knowledge of elites, government policies, protocols, and actions in service of intelligence about law and governance. ^{Footnote 47} The shift toward these questions can be seen in recent American Political Science Association presidencies ^{Footnote 48} and in new scholarship shifting our attention from questions about the public to those about who runs government. This may mean using large-n datasets, for instance those on which Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page drew to characterize U.S. power as oligarchic, ^{Footnote 49} or painstaking and expensive efforts to assess elites through interviews, as undertaken by Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright, who studied the political activities and policy preferences of the “top one-tenth of 1 per cent of wealth-holders.” ^{Footnote 50} Consistent with the narrative of political research indicated here, Page, Bartels, and Seawright observe that “it is striking how little political scientists actually know about the political attitudes and behavior of wealthy citizens.” ^{Footnote 51} They note as well a “boost [to studies of political inequality] from the APSA taskforce led by Theda Skocpol and Lawrence Jacobs.” ^{Footnote 52} The authors discussed here and the trends they cite ^{Footnote 53} suggest at least part of the discipline is moving far afield from the demands of national intelligence.

Why call this work forensic? Now colloquial for the techniques of gathering evidence from crime-scenes, the meaning of “forensic” is much broader: “belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts of judicature or to public discussion and debate.” ^{Footnote 54} Forensic intelligence discovers, elicits, and produces knowledge of law and force with the ultimate objective of thwarting injustice. ^{Footnote 55} In other words, how do our laws, as well as the use of physical and discursive force by the government and private parties, produce injustice and what actions can citizens, including citizen scholars, take to thwart this? ^{Footnote 56}

Of course there are important disparities between some of the scholarship cited and a specifically forensic research agenda, the latter of which explicitly prioritizes investigations into the dynamics among law, force, and injustice, as well as a) visibility, locating injustice to critically explain that which was previously unseen; b) proximity of time and location, narrating locations of time and place that may seem distant to reveal their contiguities with injustices of this moment; c) transparency, access to information from government and elite institutions more generally, including our colleagues and research universities; and d) critical intelligence, iterative scholarship that affects government through its questions, attracts new information in the wake of publicizing research, and learns from its mistakes.

Jacques Derrida describes institutions, including the university, as a “body made up of knotted speeds or rhythms, or knotted differences in rhythm. A knot that represents the vibrations of different speeds. It is not representable, but this is what an institution is, nonetheless. Every institution is this. Language is this. A phrase is this.” ^{Footnote 57} If one understands a specific institution, idea, or phrase as a point on what appears to be a linear thread of time, and that each of these, as well as each organization, policy, or event, also manifests outcomes of related institutions, ideas, and phrases, as well as of a past that is unknown or seems completely separate, then the knots becomes a metaphor for how these distant points meet up and become entangled and enmeshed. My goal for the Clinic research is to observe these knots and to address our attention to the ones that manifest the most injustice. To do so intelligently means encompassing insights and pursuing tangents far afield from the more focused, professional pursuits of lawyers or legal scholars. Forensic intelligence demands theoretical, historical, and literary expertise that normal legal research does not require. Forensic intelligence, and not just knowledge of legal facts, entails understanding current symptoms in their totality, moving back and forth between the adjacent surfaces of, say, California jails as the source for U.S. citizens deported from Arizona detention facilities and California as the fictional island in a fifteenth-century romance taken to be factually accurate by the expedition of Hernán Cortés that “discovered” the imaginary Amazonian island in 1532. ^{Footnote 58} It entails understanding the Correction Corporation of America detention facility in Lumpkin, Georgia in relation to the decrepit town’s eponymous Wilson Lumpkin, the House member who in 1828 introduced the Indian Removal Act and in 1831, as Georgia’s governor, presided over its implementation. ^{Footnote 59} It entails studying the dynamic between the refugees terrorized by war and the United States and European governments turning them away or whining about their burdens on the economy, while subsidizing military and weapons manufacture and sales producing bloodshed. ^{Footnote 60}

The model of forensic intelligence that animates Clinic work can perhaps best be clarified by some examples of the work we do:

• Dollar Per Day Wages in Immigration Jails. ^{Footnote 61} Portions of this Clinic research were reported on the front page of the New York Times and drew the attention of Chicago attorney Andrew Szot, ^{Footnote 62} who initiated a collaboration of his law firm with Professor Tenenbaum and also Andrew Free. Northwestern Law School students from the Bluhm Legal Clinic are collecting statements from current and former ICE facility residents and advocates on civil and labor rights violations. ^{Footnote 63} An article on the prison industry’s use of labor by respondents in ICE custody and the new litigation responsive to this will appear in the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal. ^{Footnote 64}

• Immigration Judge Misconduct. Assistant Professor Heather Schoenfeld, a sociologist in Legal Studies and the School of Education and Social Policy, and I are supervising Farrell Fellows Ary Hansen and Elizabeth Meehan in a study of 794 recently released individual case summaries on how the Executive Office of Immigration Review responds to immigration judge misconduct complaints. This data and EOIR protocols for coding were released responsive to our FOIA requests. ^{Footnote 65} The students used Excel to code the responses and generated descriptive analyses, many at their own initiative. ^{Footnote 66}

• Sexual Intimacies and the Bona-Fide Marriage. Clinic Program Associate and J.D./Ph.D. student Charles Clarke is the co-Principal Investigator in a study comparing the rate and character of non-matching answers during spousal “green card” interviews with the rate and character of non-matching answers on “The Newlywed Game,” the latter a television game show premised on the assumption that bona fide couples will have non-matching answers to questions about which couples share the same information. (Our hypothesis is that, for both sets of couples, questions that elicit information implicating the heteronormative marriage script are less likely to produce matching responses than questions on less fraught topics such as habits for washing dishes.)

• ICE Office of Inspector General (OIG) Cover-up. We recently concluded FOIA litigation over an ICE OIG report responsive to an attorney complaint about ICE agents robbing his client of $1,200 cash in the St. Paul/-Minneapolis airport. The FOIA complaint itself was drafted and filed at the federal courthouse in downtown Chicago by then-freshman Sam Niiro. Andrew Free entered the case as our attorney. For negotiations over the release of relevant airport video, student volunteer Christina Seminara reviewed and tracked events on a partial OIG video release and located local vendors for pricing estimates allowing us to refute the government’s claim that redacting third-party images would be cost-prohibitive. We ultimately received three sets of video recordings corroborating the account of the deported legal resident, who has since returned from Nigeria at ICE expense and in June naturalized as a U.S. citizen, owing to the heroic efforts of her pro bono attorney Richard Breitman.

• Fraudulent Denial of Marriage Petitions to Procure FBI Informants. Kennan (not his real name) provided the Clinic with recordings of FBI agents threatening his deportation if he did not become an informant. ^{Footnote 67} He refused and ICE issued a deportation order. Unsure of whether use of these one-party consent recordings of government agents was lawful, I contacted Professor Tenenbaum and Bluhm Legal Clinic intern Joe Delich conducted research and concluded that federal agents have no special privileges that would trump state recording laws. ^{Footnote 68}

Additional lawsuits include three by Free on behalf of detained or deported U.S. citizens, two of whom were encountered through the Deportation Research Clinic and one of whom encountered Free through reference to these cases on the Clinic blog. ^{Footnote 69}

Each of the Clinic’s research projects is a collaborative effort to combine investigative research with political theorizing about the nation-state and definitions of citizenship, with an eye toward producing new knowledge that can be characterized as “belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts of judicature or to public discussion and debate.” ^{Footnote 70}

The Future of Forensic Research: Opportunities and Challenges

All political inquiry would benefit from a greater appreciation of the dynamic relationships between knowledge production and political outcomes. As a result of inexpensive information technologies, researchers are initiating studies and collaborations that until recently would have required the resources and thus permission of gatekeepers whose commitments often were to the panopticon and not the citizens. For instance, not only the Scholars Strategy Network ^{Footnote 71} and the Social Science Research Network, ^{Footnote 72} but free blog creation and hosting services enable immediate public exposure of one’s expertise that would be unavailable to earlier generations of scholars absent significant institutional financial support for, say, expensive design, printing, and distribution of brochures or reports. Likewise, e-mail, including list-serves, enables instant exchanges with a range of scholars, students, policy-makers, journalists, attorneys, and non-profit advocates outside one’s own academic professional network.

Information is not just more easily distributed but also almost effortlessly acquired. Digital data technologies enable sending FOIA requests by e-mail for thousands of pages of documents in a few minutes. Professional scholars of politics also can cull cutting-edge research, databases, and laws that until fairly recently would have required hours or even weeks of legwork. Undergraduates can perform simple controls on Excel spreadsheets and track interesting results for thousands of cases. Electronic resources developed over the last twenty years make a mockery out of our current subfields, whose specialization was a capitulation to time constraints that no longer exist or are greatly diminished, including for area studies, now that cheap international travel and the internet facilitate scholarly study and collaborations across great distances, enabling further currently missed opportunities for political intelligence in the discipline as it is now constituted. In each of these ways, new communications technologies facilitate the kinds of investigations, disclosures, and sharing of information and perspectives that are at the heart of the forensic research practiced by the Clinic.

At the same time, such forensic research faces an uphill battle against powerful interests used to working without oversight. The main impediment to research on government misconduct is, not surprisingly, the government itself. Not only does the government not support research into its own abuses; the government, and especially its military, security, and surveillance components including federal, local, and state law-enforcement agencies organized through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, actively impede the kind of critical research practiced by the Clinic. This takes a number of forms, each with different frequency and severity: 1) the unlawful denial of access to information, immigration courts, ^{Footnote 73} and detention facilities, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to undertake research; ^{Footnote 74} 2) illegal surveillance, creating a climate of intimidation and fear; ^{Footnote 75} and 3) the close ties between the state and many important research enterprises and universities, which can affect access to research support and thus create an uneven playing field for scholarly productivity, and can also foster a general atmosphere of corporatist compliance. The challenge such linkages to the state present to critical scholarship was sharply posed by Senator William Fulbright in a 1967 floor speech that still holds true today:

Fulbright goes on to lament the university “dispensing conventional orthodoxy rather than new ideas,” and points out that in doing so, it is “not only failing to meet its responsibilities to its students, it is betraying a great public trust.” ^{Footnote 77} As long as social scientists align themselves with militarized and securitized government priorities, they will receive substantial funding and accolades, ^{Footnote 78} but at the price of abandoning their independent scholarship. This often is not because a scholar deliberately sells out, but, more insidiously, because the contemporary university and political science have dove-tailed knowledge with the priorities of the nation-state so tightly that it often is hard to distinguish a freely-chosen political science research project from the effects of government hegemony.

Northwestern University (NU) today is a case in point. On the one hand, its Buffet Institute for Global Studies houses the Deportation Clinic. On the other hand, university leadership serves under the CEOs and directors of General Dynamics (GD), Boeing, and Caterpillar, ^{Footnote 79} firms deeply enmeshed in the priorities of the domestic and foreign military and national intelligence communities that the Clinic investigates. ^{Footnote 80} And of course, my colleagues here and elsewhere receive funding from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) ^{Footnote 81} —which also is awarding contracts to military contractors, including Boeing and GD. ^{Footnote 82} These companies, in addition to Caterpillar, are banned from the investment portfolios of numerous organizations ^{Footnote 83} and even countries, in the case of GD, for cluster bombs. ^{Footnote 84} When an NU newsletter quotes a researcher about to go on leave as a DARPA program manager saying he will acquire “new expertise in neighboring fields and pursue those areas when I return to Northwestern,” we know at DARPA he will not be engineering technology for abused detainees to upload video and other documentation of guard misconduct for public display and administrative review, and that when the researcher returns to campus, he will not be teaching his students how to use Global Positioning System technology for monitoring cluster bombs from sale point to end use, even though the research behind police body cameras or proposals for gun and ammo microtracing suggests the need for both technologies.

Perhaps the most visible form this enmeshment takes appears in Qatar, where Northwestern, with early State Department support and now a Memorandum of Understanding with Qatar-owned Al Jazeera, ^{Footnote 85} runs a campus that has no tenure lines, no oversight by Evanston faculty committees, ^{Footnote 86} and where faculty and students work in a “climate of fear” ^{Footnote 87} under the heavy-handed direction of a CEO serving at the behest of a dictatorship and NU’s Board of military contractors, firms with Qatar and regional offices ^{Footnote 88} and contracts that require that they invest a portion of sales in education, research, and development. ^{Footnote 89} These payments often run through the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, ^{Footnote 90} managed by the ruling Al Thani family that runs Doha’s Education City, including the NU campus. ^{Footnote 91}

The Crown family, #35 among the Forbes list of America’s Richest Families, with “$3.8 billion in GD shares, the single biggest source of their fortune,” ^{Footnote 92} has Lester Crown and A. Stephen Crown on the NU board, and has provided NU numerous endowments for buildings, programs, activities, and chairs. ^{Footnote 93} “Every Israeli prime minister, every Israeli president knows the Crown family,’ said Steven Nasatir, president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, ^{Footnote 94} itself the recipient of almost $7 million from the Crown Family Foundation in 2012 alone. ^{Footnote 95} A 2005 interview reports on Lester Crown spending a “tremendous amount of time in the Gulf countries,” and his concerns about Israel’s security. ^{Footnote 96} The Crown focus lately has been on Jewish and Israel studies, including the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies and Israel Studies, the Crown Chair in Israel Studies, and the Crown Visiting Chair in Israel Studies. ^{Footnote 97} The family has endowed no chairs for Palestine, Critical, or Cosmopolitan Studies. In light of these signals of funding and influence, those of us who pursue research interfering with the agendas of our employers have no sanctuary in our institution when the national and military intelligence community, of which NU is a part, turn against us. ^{Footnote 98}

This context is confounding but not unique, ^{Footnote 99} thus offering opportunities to learn more about the role U.S. private universities, including satellite campuses, play in military contracts and U.S. foreign policy. ^{Footnote 100} In the face of this dynamic, I believe that scholars interested in forensic intelligence have two major tasks ahead. One project is to work with colleagues to produce policies for our campuses and professional associations that would require individuals to disclose funding sources, whether they are producing research that cannot be publicly released, to ban the collection of information about non-public activities of students or faculty on university campuses, and to require of private universities the same financial disclosures as those released by public universities. It is essential that there be greater transparency about the “interested” character of much social-science research funding, and also greater attention to the domestic and foreign policy implications of research elicited by major state and corporate institutions, ^{Footnote 101} as well as the possible complicity with secret and even unlawful government activities. ^{Footnote 102} Are universities teaching students how to promote rights and effective democratic citizenship, or are the universities themselves, especially in satellite campuses, accommodating opaque government initiatives and Gulf state dictators, thus reinforcing subtle and unsubtle forms of political subjection? Political scientists ought to be much more serious about asking these questions, which bear directly on the subject matter of our discipline. ^{Footnote 103} The second task is to continue to seek release of information withheld on grounds of “national security,” and to press for access to the prisons, detention centers, and deportation facilities where abuses are regularly committed and hidden from public view. The primary purpose of forensic intelligence as practiced at the Deportation Research Clinic is to bring such practices to light through new networks and collaborations that use techniques and theories specific to understanding, narrating and ameliorating unjust state violence. This work is not an alternative to political studies, theories, or science, but their culmination.