Faculty Spotlight Evelyn Rangel-Medina

Evelyn Rangel-Medina

Assistant Professor of Law

By Suzi Morales

Structural racism has evolved and changed over time, often alongside and in lock-step with our immigration system, and yet our analysis of how these systems interact has not kept up. Evelyn Rangel-Medina is changing that.

Drawing on her experience as an organizer, policy advocate, and public interest lawyer, Rangel-Medina, an assistant professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, is shedding a scholarly spotlight on issues of racial discrimination and immigration. She’s even coined a term to describe racialized immigration systems: “citizenism.”

Defining “citizenism”

According to a recent article by Rangel-Medina, “Citizenism functions as a legalized system of discrimination that uses citizenship status to perpetuate racialized outcomes for communities of color.” This includes suppressing the rights of citizens of color when “law and immigration enforcement make legally permissible presumptions about citizenship based on race, which delimits the fundamental rights of citizens of color.”

In other words, says Rangel-Medina, citizenism is “the illegalization of people of color that allows for racial discrimination to happen without calling it racial discrimination.” For example, she cites the 1975 Supreme Court case of United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, in which the Supreme Court held that “Mexican appearance” is a “relevant factor” for suspicion of undocumented status. The case continues to be a valid precedent and generally permits racial profiling of Latinxs in the United States. Although immigration laws now purport to be race-neutral, Rangel-Medina’s paper argues that citizenism continues to be a way to criminalize race based on status.

My scholarship is very interested in how white supremacy evolves and how legal categories that are perceived to be race-neutral are coded and have the effects of perpetuating racial subordination, particularly in the immigration system, which is rooted in racial exclusion and regulation

Evelyn Rangel-Medina

Navigating generational illegality

Before law school, Rangel-Medina was an organizer and worked as Policy Director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “I decided to come to law school partly because I realized that the conversation around immigration, immigration reform, and racial equity was incomplete,” she recalls. “It lacked analysis, both of directly impacted people and those who work in the frontlines of those issues.”

After law school, she advocated for non-unionized workers on issues ranging from discrimination to increasing labor standards in low-wage industries as a University of California Public Interest Law Fellow and Managing Director of Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC United) and United for Respect.

Rangel-Medina’s upcoming scholarship explores what she calls “generational illegality” that families of color, including her own, have long navigated. Her family members have been migrating to the United States since around 1905, recruited by large corporations to fill labor needs.

Rangel-Medina questions why families of color face racial discrimination in the form of immigration enforcement that prevent them from building stability. “My upcoming article investigates intergenerational injuries that delimit the equitable integration of families of color,” she says.

Rangel-Medina herself was undocumented. She remembers growing up in the 1990s when the national conversation was influenced by actions like California’s Proposition 187, which prevented undocumented immigrants from accessing public services like education. “I remember being in middle school and hearing my teachers say horrible things that were acceptable [at that time],” she recalls. “That’s what drove me to become a lawyer and drives my intellectual curiosity as a scholar to understand how structural subordination evolves and investigate the best avenues for the law to address it.”

Rangel-Medina’s recent article on citizenism is dedicated to her abuelita, now 88 years old and having lived as an undocumented migrant navigating the system of immigration enforcement most of her life. “She often tells me I represent all of her dreams come true,” Rangel-Medina wrote. “I pray every day not to disappoint her.”