Caging Borders and Carceral States

Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance

Robert T. Chase

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781469651248, 9781469651231
• eBook ISBN: 9781469651255
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty. As these studies depict the institutional development and state scaffolding of overlapping carceral regimes, they also consider how prisoners and immigrants resisted such oppression and violence by drawing on the transnational politics of human rights and liberation, transcending the isolation of incarceration, detention, deportation and the boundaries of domestic law.


Contributors: Dan Berger, Ethan Blue, George T. Díaz, David Hernandez, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Pippa Holloway, Volker Janssen, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Heather McCarty, Douglas K. Miller, Vivien Miller, Donna Murch, and Keramet Ann Reiter.

PART I

From Western Conquests to Border Cages

Borderlands, Immigration, West

Carceral Shadows

Entangled Lineages and Technologies of Migrant Detention

DAVID MANUEL HERNÁNDEZ

Other Incarcerations

This chapter examines the connective tissues and tense relations shared by U.S. prison and detention apparatuses through the exploration of roots, foundations, and trajectories of immigrant detention in the context of the U.S. prison. It considers what Gerald Neuman terms the “lost century of immigration control” that occurred alongside slavery and emancipation prior to the consolidation of the federal immigration authority.1 These roots of detention reflect a complex history of immobilizing, isolating, and forcefully removing black, Indigenous, and, later, migrant bodies within and from the nation. The chapter is a story not of progress or decline but of the entrenchment of legal and material powers over noncitizens. It discusses the maturation of technologies of detention and removal that followed the institutionalization of federal immigration control bureaucracies and practices in the 1890s. The malleable transposition of racialized targets of immigration enforcement is a critical technology in the history of immigrant detention. These racial dimensions are explored through an analysis of the foundational enforcement focus on Asian migration through a transition to a robust and iconic criminalization of Latina and Latino “illegals” in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although Asian and Latino detainees share the historical stage with other immigrant detainees, white and nonwhite, the targeting of Asian and Latina/o immigrants in immigration enforcement is pervasive, influential, and emblematic. Finally, the chapter discusses the contemporary merger of criminal and immigration law and enforcement that is occurring today. All told, it expands the historical understanding and future political horizons of carceral regimes by considering a multiracial and parallel site of incarceration, expulsion, and punishment.

One might ask where, or perhaps if, a chapter on immigrant detention belongs in a volume centered on carceral studies. After all, immigrants in detention are not serving criminal sentences. Their confinement is not related directly to a criminal conviction. Nor do they labor in prison industries. Immigrant detainees, instead, are incarcerated pursuant to their involuntary removal from the United States. They may be undocumented persons, asylum seekers, temporary visitors in violation of visa regulations, or legal permanent residents who have committed deportable acts.2 For these reasons and others, the study of immigrant detention is often situated marginally alongside the larger discourse on prisons and prison abolition. But there are linkages and correlations, as well as critical disjunctures, between these two carceral states. Immigrant detainees, for example, are easily conflated with the criminally imprisoned through racist stereotypes and the multifaceted force of criminalization technologies. Apprehended at ports of entry and also the interior of the nation, detainees often reside in the same or similar facilities as the criminally convicted, including the majority in nearly 250 local jails and private prisons nationwide, as well as six federal service processing centers. As a result, detainees are often counted among incarcerated persons in the U.S. prison industrial complex—accounting for infrastructural growth and body count—but with less a focus on the regime’s legal and historical particularities. A unique set of guiding policies and legal purviews manages the detention of immigrants, including a different court system and a particular legal jurisdiction—a federal one. Detainees might be a part of the prison system spatially, but they are also generally apart from that system legally.

Figure 1 Steven Rubin, Handprints, Federal Detention Facility, Seattle, Washington, 2001. Courtesy of the photographer.

Today, the enormity of the prison industrial complex and its prolific and radical array of scholarship eclipses, it seems, immigrants in detention. For one, the quintupling of immigrant detainees that has occurred in the last twenty years suggests that detention expansion is a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century quandary, and not one that has lasted for over one hundred years. In what is considered the “fastest-growing form of incarceration,”3 roughly 40,000 immigrants are detained daily (compared with 7,000 in the mid-1990s), and roughly ten times that amount pass through detention annually. Deportations amounted to nearly 400,000 at the end of the Bush administration and peaked in 2013 at 438,000, as President Obama exceeded his predecessor in this task, expanding a variety of enforcement practices nationally.4 Signaling a continued increase, the Trump administration oversaw a 38 percent increase from the previous year in immigrant arrests in its first one hundred days.5 Significant as the numbers are, these figures pale in comparison to 2.3 million persons caged daily in federal, state, and local prisons and jails as a result of criminal arrest and conviction. Further, within policy discussions of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), detention is far down the list of priorities behind legalization and amnesty, guest worker programs, border militarization, workplace raids, and the plight of undocumented university students. In fact, most recent legislative attempts at CIR by both political parties included expansions in detention enforcement, such as expanding the list of deportable crimes for noncitizens, removing barriers to indefinite detention, and expanding fast-track deportation processes that bypass court backlogs. Certain to expand the system’s infrastructure, most detention reforms under the guise of CIR also include criminalizing “gang affiliation”6 in lieu of criminal acts and criminalizing persons providing life-saving aid to persons entering the country without inspection.7 These trends reflect the merger of criminal law enforcement with immigration bureaucracies.

Detention’s entanglement with the U.S. prison system, as this chapter suggests, requires the recognition of these parallel and often intersecting carceral histories and also a disentangling of the institution to reveal its distinct trajectory. As a carceral institution, detention reflects a variety of technological consolidations and accumulations of legal, administrative, and generally nationalist state power over immigrants, especially nonwhite immigrants. Just as Hogan suggests that the U.S. national security state stemmed from perceived military threats of the Cold War in tension with a political culture that feared a “garrison state,”8 expansions of immigrant detention mirror this pattern: depending on perceived national crises and a merging of racist and xenophobic cultural practices in tension with the nation’s self-perception as a haven for immigrants. The genealogy of detention reveals a long period (from the 1890s to the present) of bureaucratic institutionalization of federal immigration agencies (first the Bureau of Immigration, then the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and now Immigration and Customs Enforcement9) and their physical infrastructure, as well as the figurative and material construction of national borders, and the movement of the detention and deportation authority from the international boundaries into the interior of the nation. Interior enforcement, in particular, creates a form of “eternal probation” for all noncitizens,10 legal or unauthorized, that suggests a long-term surveillance strategy, long after migration, often leading to family and community dissolution, workplace and economic interruption, and the stigma of banishment. By taking the long view of the detention regime, we bear witness to the accrual of flexible state power over noncitizens as well as an enduring partnership with the criminal justice system that mutually reinforces the other.

Immigration’s “Lost Century”

The immobilization and forced removal of persons in what is the United States has deep roots that predate the formation of the Bureau of Immigration in the 1890s and the founding of the nation in the eighteenth century. Unearthing these roots is critical to understanding detention history, including its affinities to prisons and criminal incarceration. Moon-Ho Jung’s Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, for example, draws together the state control of chattel slavery in relation to the recruitment and later exclusion of Chinese “coolie” labor, arguing that the two institutions were “inextricably bound,”11 reflecting a transition from laws governing the slave trade to the foundational legal structure managing nonwhite immigrants. Immigrant detention also draws from the heritage of slave labor, the control of free blacks, or the recapture of fugitive slaves. In fact, the control of nonwhite immigrant mobility plays a critical function in labor management, the industrial development of the West, and the establishment of national sovereignty. During the century prior to the federal institutionalization of its immigration authority via the regulation and exclusion of Chinese laborers, the federal government, states and territories, local municipalities, as well as armed mobs in acts of “racial vigilantism”12 excluded and, if need be, captured and removed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Carceral Networks: Rethinking Region and Connecting Carceral Borders
• Part I: From Western Conquests to Border Cages: Borderlands, Immigration, West
• Part II: Prison Labor and Gender from South to Sunbelt
• Part III: Constructing the Sunbelt Prison Industrial Complex
• Part IV: Resistance: Confronting the Carceral State
• Contributor Biographies
• Index