January 28, 2026

As the spring semester gets underway, domestic and global events make it an unsettlingly perfect time to revisit our speaker series from last fall on the theme of "Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control." In the last month, we have seen escalations abroad and at home:

  • A sovereign nation was breached by the U.S. military and a foreign head of state captured in the name of a U.S. domestic criminal arrest warrant through extraterritorial law enforcement (Read more via Just Security)
     
  • The head of the U.S. central bank has been targeted with a criminal investigation (Read more via Harvard Kennedy School)
     
  • Multiple people have been executed by federal agents, in public, on cameras held by observers [not body cameras on law enforcement], and dozens more have died or been killed in ICE detention (Read more via Al Jazeera Media Network)
     
  • Detention in camps, jails, prisons, and uninhabitable office buildings of migrants continues at an unprecedented pace (Read more via American Immigration Council)
     
  • Conditions in those detention camps mirror the worst elements of our existing jails and prisons (Read more via ACLU)
     
  • ICE is the highest funded U.S. law enforcement agency (Read more via NPR)
     
  • Courts have curtailed unlawful federal troop deployments which imperil community safety (Learn more via Harvard Kennedy School), but leaders continue to threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act, a blanket criminalization of dissent backed by military force (Read more via National Immigration Law Center)
     
  • The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Minnesota state officials for allegedly obstructing federal immigration enforcement (Read more via Protect Democracy)
     
  • The scale of the Homeland Security officers deployed to Minneapolis (2,000 federal agents so far, per PBS) far outpaces the numerical size of local law enforcement in the Twin Cities (Read more via Minneapolis Star Tribune)
     
  • Federal officials have labeled protestors killed by federal agents domestic terrorists, in keeping with an official memo released by the U.S. Department of Justice in December (Read more via Brennan Center for Justice)
     
  • Federal officials continue to refer to undocumented migrants as "criminals" for the civil violation of federal immigration law (including people with pending legal immigration status per the Boston Globe), yet independent analyses by the CATO Institute and the New York Times show merely 5-7% of people in detention have convictions for violent crimes (Read more via Poynter)

The role of criminal law and criminalization in this concentration of power is clearer than ever. This escalation builds on a foundation of dehumanization and torture woven into many elements of our criminal system.

What we are seeing on the national stage does not mark a rupture, but an amplification of practices long entrenched at the local level — practices that have always rendered people in custody vulnerable to routine violence and death. 

In our backyard, Shacoby Kenny was killed by correctional officers in Boston's South Bay jail on December 7, 2025, held pretrial on $2,500 cash bail (read more via Boston Globe). His killing is eerily similar to the murder of Geraldo Lunas Campos in ICE detention in El Paso, whose death the medical examiner classified as a homicide, determining he asphyxiated while being restrained by guards (read more via The Texas Tribune).

Learn from experts to better understand these developments and how sense-making of these events in historical and comparative context can offer new tools to resist authoritarian creep. The talks from the Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series are all available for free on our website and YouTube channel.

For further reading:


The Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series was organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and  Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice (HKS); Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Professor of Sociology (FAS).

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Photo credit: Banner photograph by Chad Davis.