Austin Kocher
Austin Kocher, Whitman Faculty Fellow in the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), wrote an op-ed for The Hill titled “What’s behind Trump’s project to defund ‘anarchist jurisdictions?’” Kocher’s research interests include the political and legal geographies of policing and immigration.
This fall President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the withholding of funds from so-called “anarchist jurisdictions.” It was later revealed that New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, were the specified “anarchist jurisdictions,” all of which saw extensive protests this summer.
In the piece, Kocher argues that President Trump’s attempts “to politicize federal funding through the notion of ‘anarchist jurisdictions’ is only the latest in a long line of strategies by political leaders to justify draconian policies by using imaginary legal geographies of disorder and chaos.”
Kocher, who is teaching an immigration course, Geographies of Migration and Mobility, in spring 2021, draws parallels to the expansion of U.S.-Mexico border policing, as these similar attempts to create imaginary spaces of disorder have only worsened the situation.
“If he gets his way, Trump will turn his fictional world of ‘anarchist jurisdictions’ into reality, harming many people in the process,” Kocher writes.
