New Books on Immigration Out in 2026

By My Undocumented Life on March 26, 2026 • ( 0 )

If you are looking for books to add to your summer reading list, check out this set of books on immigration that are out this year!

Sanctuary Making: Immigrant Families Reshaping Geographies of Deportability by Carolina Valdivia

“Immigration policy and enforcement practices in the United States now extend beyond the border to the country’s interior, impacting the private lives of millions of undocumented and mixed-status families in new ways. Sanctuary Making traces this shift, showing how as enforcement has expanded and deepened, new “hot spots” have appeared across nontraditional sites such as neighborhoods, roads, worksites, hospitals, grocery stores, and homes. Undercurrents of fear, anxiety, and loss permeate the everyday lives of the families navigating these terrains of enforcement.

Carolina Valdivia reveals the emotional and material labor of young adults that often underpins families’ sanctuary making efforts—strategies to shield against the worst outcomes of enforcement. Many young adults are compelled to take on parental responsibilities and serve as a primary source of emotional support for family members while also brokering legal processes tied to their family’s immigration cases. How might policymakers, organizers, educators, and the wider community better support these young people in their efforts to create sanctuary for their families in an increasingly hostile landscape?”

Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities by Veronica Terriquez

“Children of immigrants make up more than one in four people in the United States under the age of thirty. Amid today’s multipronged attacks on immigrant communities and growing threats to democratic participation, these young people often encounter significant barriers to political participation. Despite these challenges, some children of immigrants and refugees engage in nonpartisan grassroots campaigns, addressing issues such as education, health, environmental justice, immigrant rights, housing, and voting rights. In Learning to Lead, sociologist Veronica Terriquez examines how youth organizing groups facilitate the civic and political engagement of low-income, second-generation immigrant adolescents, enabling them to collectively exercise power alongside their non-immigrant peers and adult allies.

Drawing on extensive surveys, semi-structured interviews, and other data, Terriquez shows that nonprofit youth organizing groups strengthen adolescents’ capacity to address the systemic challenges facing their communities through political engagement. These groups generally share a commitment to supporting young people’s healthy development, offer a critical form of civics education, and provide extensive guidance on how to participate in civic life. They adapt their programming in response to local demographic and political dynamics.”

Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds by Amelia Frank-Vitale

“Hondurans have been at the heart of some of the most visible migration phenomena in the last few years, as well as the direct target of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. In Leave If You Can, Amelia Frank-Vitale offers a detailed portrait of the Honduran exodus and what it reveals about the broader consequences of changing US border enforcement policies. She highlights the stories of those who are often presented as unsympathetic: deported young men implicitly associated with the very violence they are trying to flee. In the process, she challenges underlying assumptions frequently held by policy makers and humanitarian agencies.

Connecting overlapping regimes of mobility control, from the invisible gangland borders within San Pedro Sula to the growing expansiveness of the U.S. border’s reach, this book shows how deportation does not deter migration but, in fact, keeps people moving, and how U.S. policies fuel the migration “crisis” they claim to address. Drawing from her own experiences accompanying migrant caravans over many years, Frank-Vitale also explores how caravans emerge as both protest movement and migration tactic in response to this expanding border regime.”

COMING LATER IN 2026

Enduring Illegality: Time and the State of Waiting in Undocumented Middle Life by Angela Garcia

“Enduring Illegality chronicles the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants who have spent decades in the United States waiting for a path to legalization that never arrives. Based on longitudinal fieldwork, this book traces how people who migrated as young adults have transitioned into middle age still undocumented, caught in a state of legal and temporal suspension. Focusing on parents who would have qualified for the failed Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program, Angela S. García argues that illegality is not only a legal condition but a temporal one, produced and reproduced through decades of waiting for reform. Even in the face of such exclusion, migrants sustain lives, labor, and care across borders. Enduring Illegality offers a critical account of how the state uses time as a mechanism of immigration control, structuring lives and inequality in ways that outlast any single policy or presidential administration.”

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