Detain and Deport

The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime

Nancy Hiemstra, Sapana Doshi, Mathew Coleman

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780820354637, 9780820354651
• eBook ISBN: 9780820354644
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Detention and deportation have become keystones of immigration and border enforcement policies around the world. The United States has built a massive immigration enforcement system that detains and deports more people than any other country. This system is grounded in the assumptions that national borders are territorially fixed and controllable, and that detention and deportation bolster security and deter migration. Nancy Hiemstra's multisited ethnographic research pairs investigation of enforcement practices in the United States with an exploration into conditions migrants face in one country of origin: Ecuador.

Detain and Deport's transnational approach reveals how the U.S. immigration enforcement system's chaotic organization and operation distracts from the mismatch between these assumptions and actual outcomes. Hiemstra draws on the experiences of detained and deported migrants, as well as their families and communities in Ecuador, to show convincingly that instead of deterring migrants and improving national security, detention and deportation generate insecurities and forge lasting connections across territorial borders. At the same time, the system's chaos works to curtail rights and maintain detained migrants on a narrow path to deportation. Hiemstra argues that in addition to the racialized ideas of national identity and a fluctuating dependence on immigrant labor that have long propelled U.S. immigration policies, the contemporary emphasis on detention and deportation is fueled by the influence of people and entities that profit from them.

CHAPTER 1

A Transnational Ethnography of U.S. Detention and Deportation

I was standing off a busy street in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on a hot day in August 2009. A lumbering bus pulled off the street into the Ecuadorian Migration compound, carrying thirty-seven Ecuadorians who had just arrived after being deported from the United States. They got off the bus and lined up behind several tables. At one table, the deportees gave their identification information and answered a few questions. At another, they were reunited with possessions taken from them when they were first detained weeks or months earlier. An Ecuadorian government employee handed out small nylon knapsacks containing a few toiletry items, a thin blanket, and leaflets about government services. Deportees were also given a small sandwich and a cup of soda.

Another bus awaited to take deportees to Cuenca, about four hours away, and I climbed aboard with eighteen passengers. When the bus pulled away, there were several celebratory whoops. As we moved through Guayaquil traffic, some deportees marveled at how things had changed since they had last been there. Two men sitting near me had been in the United States for ten years. A man behind me said in perfect English that he had left Ecuador when he was fourteen years old, and he was seeing the country for the first time in sixteen years.

I pulled out my cell phone, and suddenly it seemed that everyone on the bus wanted to borrow it to announce their homecoming or to arrange a ride in Cuenca. The man next to me struggled to remember phone numbers, but eventually reached his daughter. He choked up as he told her he was back in Ecuador, to get the family together. As he handed the phone to me, he said quietly that he would only be able to recognize his children from photographs. A young woman said she would be so happy to see her children and her mother, but her husband was still detained somewhere in the United States, and she was worried about him. Other deportees talked about their experiences in U.S. detention facilities, about terrible food, denied requests to see doctors, cold rooms, and threats from guards to be put in the “hole.” Many had struggled against anger, frustration, and desperation as their incarcerations stretched from weeks to months, not knowing when they would be released.

For several people on the bus, deportation was not a new experience. One young man said it was his third time. Most deportees said that they would go right back. One man explained, “What is there for me here? Nothing. I have to go back. I have to do it for my family.” Throughout the trip to Cuenca, people got off at small towns and crossroads. At about 11 p.m., the bus pulled into the Cuenca terminal. The remaining riders exited into the darkened city streets—an odd, unremarkable homecoming.

There is a particular spatiotemporal logic behind detention and deportation as key immigration enforcement strategies of the United States. Detention is understood as the physical containment of unwanted immigrants, and deportation as ejecting immigrants out of a national territory and ending their migration story. Both policies are intended to spread a transnational message of nonwel-come to potential migrants, deterring future migration. In other words, the logic behind detention and deportation is anchored in the idea that states are able to tightly control their borders, and it assumes a clear territorial break—in space and time—in terms of membership and belonging.

The opening anecdote from my fieldwork in Ecuador immediately refutes this logic. We see that instead of enforcing neat breaks and barriers in cross-boundary movement, detention and deportation policies actually work to solidify and deepen ties between the United States and Ecuador through space and time. For many deportees, deportation is not over upon their arrival in Ecuador; in fact, it has just started, as migrants attempt to make their way in Ecuador amid great uncertainty. And deportation does not necessarily mean a permanent close to a migration journey; many deportees return to the United States, just as new migrants continue to go for the first time. However, in contrast to the reality conveyed in this anecdote, existing research and scholarship has largely been unable to shake the perception that detention and deportation work to enforce territorial borders or that they are necessary for the maintenance of a strong state.

Detention studies (Mountz et al. 2013) and deportation studies (Coutin 2015; Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2015) have emerged as important interdisciplinary fields that draw on, overlap with, and contribute to broader scholarship on immigration enforcement. Scholars have examined how and why detention and deportation have come to such prominence in the contemporary era. Some scholars see detention and deportation as products of the globally dominant political economic order (De Genova 2004; Hiemstra 2010; Peutz and De Genova 2010; Coleman and Kocher 2011), pointing to the role of capitalism (Golash-Boza 2015) and identifying neoliberal processes of privatization as a key driver (Walters 2008b; Golash-Boza 2009; Conlon and Hiemstra 2014; Morris 2016). Other work ties the popularity of these practices to the emphasis on defining and protecting national sovereignty in the contemporary nation-state system (Walters 2002; Mountz 2010; Mountz and Hiemstra 2014; Wong 2015) or links these policies to processes of securitization and the criminalization of migration in the modern era (De Genova 2009, 2010; Zilberg 2011; Dowling and Inda 2013; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2013; Moran, Gill, and Conlon 2013). Some of this scholarship builds on the work of theorists Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault to understand power, control, and the role of the state in detention and deportation. Agamben’s (1998, 2005) theorizations of the “camp,” spaces of exception, and bare life have been applied to practices and places of detention (e.g., Bigo 2007; Andrijasevic 2010) and to deportation (e.g., Walters 2002; De Genova 2010). Foucault’s (1979, 1991, 2007) concepts of governmentality, discipline, and biopolitics have been particularly useful to scholars of detention and deportation (e.g., Bigo 2007; Peutz and De Genova 2010), especially to think through how, for example, detention performs state power and shapes how detainees see themselves (Gill 2009a, 2009b; Conlon 2010; Martin 2012; Bosworth 2014).

This scholarship has significantly advanced understanding of the causes and consequences of this detention and deportation “turn” and has provided vital ground for curbing its seemingly unstoppable momentum. Without devaluing or diminishing this work, I suggest that even the most critical scholars often inadvertently rely on—and reinforce—existing frameworks for understanding and responding to human mobility across territorial borders. As Toal (2000) notes, critical researchers can unintentionally give more life to the very target of their critique by resurrecting it, in a kind of deconstructive paradox. In this vein, in immigration scholarship there is a tendency to adhere to the nation-state scale when studying policy and to ignore the subnational and local scales, in what some have said amounts to a “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Schiller 2003, 576). By presenting a generally abstract picture of the border, scholarship often does not problematize who the subjects of border research are, nor where research on immigration policy takes place. Even innovative work that acknowledges the role played by immigration enforcement policy in constructing borders and ideas of belonging can reinforce the state-territorial frame through a border-centric approach. Immigration scholars may also take for granted the practices that constitute “immigration control” and in so doing limit understanding of how immigration control is exercised and experienced, as well as miss opportunities to challenge these practices (Coleman and Stuesse 2016). As long as the “doing” of detention and deportation remains relatively obscured and the belief that detention and deportation contain and separate persists, these practices will continue to be central in contemporary immigration enforcement. In addition, some scholars studying policy approach it “from above,” that is, through research with those who make and implement policy and with a focus on stated intentions for policy (e.g., Peck and Theodore 2015). This can limit even critical scholars to policymakers’ visions and metrics regarding a particular policy. In migration policy research, top-down approaches can involuntarily contribute to maintaining (and reinforcing) the dominance of territorial borders in policy imaginaries, as well as restricting understanding of policy outcomes.

Conscious of these risks for critical immigration scholarship, I ground Detain and Deport on the premise that we need to fundamentally change understandings of how detention and deportation work. This book calls for a broader lens when studying immigration policy, one not restricted or shaped by state territorial borders and centering attention on the everyday. I make the case for transnational ethnography to trace how immigration policies take shape and reverberate within and outside of the United States. Transnational ethnography is both a theoretical and methodological approach that aims to study policy “from below” by tracing policy from everyday, intimate spaces and places. This feminist approach engages both embodiment and ethnography to understand lived experiences of policy, with the goals of shaking loose the hold that state territoriality has over thinking about how immigration enforcement works, and splitting open the black box of knowledge about how it is practiced.

My transnational ethnography of U.S. detention and deportation, conducted in Ecuador, draws on research with detained migrants’ families, deportees, Ecuadorian state and nonstate employees, and U.S. state and nonstate employees to broaden and deepen understanding of how U.S. immigration enforcement operates regardless of national borders. Through this approach, I argue for the reconceptualization of detention and deportation as creating spatiotemporal linkages across state borders, instead of containing or breaking them. Reframing these policies as inherently transnational means reconfiguring state power not in terms of an enforced disconnection, but instead in terms of an enforced connection between peoples and places on opposite—even nonproximate—sides of state borders.

A transnational ethnographic approach has important implications for both policymakers and scholars studying immigration enforcement. By emphasizing multiple and transnational sites of research, it contributes to disrupting frameworks of rigid territories and borders and pushes scholars to examine ways in which their work can inadvertently maintain the ideas of containment and partition that underlie detention and deportation. Transnational ethnography also facilitates more granular understanding of how these policies work in migrant origin countries as well as in the United States and why these policies are being so widely adopted today. It becomes clear that experiences of detention and deportation are not contained by detention facility walls or by national borders, and these policies bolster human smuggling networks as well as create local insecurities and instability that can galvanize new migration. This approach, too, helps fill in gaps in knowledge regarding how the complex and often opaque U.S. detention and deportation system works. We can then better recognize important influences behind today’s detention and deportation turn, such as racist, nativist ideas of American national identity, financial incentives, and political ambition.

The goal for this chapter is to provide a comprehensive theoretical and methodological introduction to transnational ethnography and outline a framework for understanding detention and deportation as expansive and elastic within and across borders. I first work to destabilize the conceptual adherence to territorial borders and the false spatiotemporal imagination on which detention and deportation rest. The chapter then outlines the theoretical foundations for a transnational ethnographic approach to policy and explains how it contributes to dismantling this spatiotemporal imagination. Finally, I sketch the specific methods used in my transnational ethnography of U.S. detention and deportation policy from Ecuador.

Shifting Spatiotemporal Imaginings

Here I outline definitions of deportation and detention that emphasize the role of space and time in controlling particular populations, defining membership, and enforcing both conceptual and physical links between nation and territory. Then I examine two broad beliefs about what deportation and detention do—protect security and deter migration—and discuss how these beliefs are based on incorrect understandings of how immigration enforcement policies work in and through space and time.

(RE)DEFINING DEPORTATION AND DETENTION

Whatever the particular context in which detention and deportation are invoked—as approaches to immigration enforcement or practices and tactics of its execution—a failure to acknowledge their expansive spatiality contributes to policies that do not work as supposed, with negative consequences both for policymakers and for those subjected to these policies. I understand both deportation and detention as inherently transnational, or always operating across territorial borders, and refuse any ideas that fix and limit these practices and their consequences in time or space.

Detention is seen by geographers, among others, as “the use of space to control people, objects, and their movement” (Martin and Mitchelson 2009, 459). Martin (2015, 236) conceptualizes detention as “a lived process and a bundle of textual and embodied practices meted out through everyday enactments” and suggests that it is a “core spatial strategy” within immigration enforcement (233). Detention can be interpreted as any type of control over movement, such as through monitoring, use of check-in requirements, or even recommended behaviors (Martin and Mitchelson 2009; Conlon 2010; Mountz et al. 2013; Flynn 2016). Here, following the most common understanding in the U.S. context, I focus on immigration detention as the forced confinement of noncitizens (and sometimes citizens assumed to be noncitizens) for reasons related to their legal status of national belonging. This confinement typically takes place in designated, highly controlled, carceral facilities. The spatial reverberations of detention, however, are not contained to these facilities. For example, incarcerated detainees are connected to peoples and places beyond their site of confinement by virtue of their economic, social, and emotional relationships and networks outside the facility. Moreover, detention does (almost always) eventually end, and former detainees leave the place of confinement with various markers of detention inscribed on and carried by their bodies.

I understand deportation as the forced physical expulsion of an individual from one country to another. Typically, that individual is a noncitizen of the deporting country, but not always, as seen in cases in the United States of the deportation of citizens due to, for example, officials’ denial of legitimate identity claims. Deportation is infused with a connective spatiotemporality. Drotbohm and Hasselberg (2015, 551) recognize that deportation “begins long before, and carries on long after, the removal from one country to another” and “crosses places and spaces, connects countries and nations” (see also Peutz 2006). I generally avoid, for the most part, the word removal—the official term used by the U.S. government—for several reasons. First, the practice of deportation is tied to the modern international order of nation-states and the very existence of territorial borders as a mechanism for defining and controlling populations (Walters 2002). Deportation has historically been understood as expulsion from one state to another, across territorial borders, resulting in banishment and exile (Walters 2002). Sites of exile, then, are necessary for the maintenance of state territorial borders and are strategically tied to the places from which people are exiled (Coutin 2016). Second, removal is a term employed by U.S. immigration officials that masks the actual practice of deportation by mixing “deportations” with “exclusions,” both euphemizing deportation and making it harder to track. Third, removal sterilizes the violence done by and in the process of forcibly transporting someone with the stated goal of permanency from one state to another. The verb deport does more than “remove” to imply that the expulsion is being done by one person or group to another, that the action is not automatic or necessary, and that it requires intention and resources.

As an important point of clarification: while I often use detention and deportation” together, for example, “detention and deportation system,” I do not view the two words as necessarily part of the same process, or as inevitably connected to one another. For one, as Martin (2015, 233) reminds us, “detention’s primary role is often understood to be the enforcement of deportation … Yet for many, detention is part of the admission or entry process.” For another, it is critically important to recognize that detention is strategically deployed in order to reach policy goals of deportation (Martin 2015). As this book explores in chapters 4 and 5, detention plays an important role in criminalizing and excluding noncitizens, as well as making it difficult for them to contest deportation (D. M. Hernández 2008; Gill 2016; Bosworth 2014; Martin 2015). By referring to the U.S. “detention and deportation system,” I do not aim to normalize deportation as an automatic outcome of detention. To the contrary, my intention is to draw attention to the constructed and manufactured nature of U.S. immigration enforcement policy, or how processes are orchestrated to funnel migrants to deportation, without consideration of actual consequences of deportation.

THE FALSE SPATIOTEMPORAL LOGIC OF DETERRENCE AND SECURITY

In the expanding use of deportation and detention, assumptions of deterrence are interwoven with those of security (Mountz et al. 2013; Hasselberg 2014). These policies are supposed to bolster security by ridding the destination country of unwanted immigrants and defending sovereign borders. It is generally thought that deported migrants will remain in their countries of origin, and potential new migrants will be dissuaded. As Martin’s (2012, 330) work on the efforts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain families and other vulnerable populations illustrates, “detention figures a transnational field of potential, future migrants” as policymakers use detainees’ bodies to discourage entry. To some degree, then, policymakers expect—and indeed count on—consequences of these policies to expand through space and time, beyond U.S. borders. But there is a profound gap between expectations and real knowledge, and few attempts have been made to trace how detention and deportation shape daily life and choices both inside and especially outside of U.S. borders, in the short and long term. This shortsightedness is both conceptual and methodological, rooted in state-centric, territorially confined ideas of security, as well as a failure to consider consequences over time. This view, then, misses a core paradox of security-driven policies: that they tend to generate multiple insecurities, for multiple populations, within the policymaking country as well as outside it.

Security imaginaries are constructed on a fundamental privileging of some groups’ security over others. The provision of security to particular members (in intentional opposition to not providing it to others) therefore links the very existence of territorial states with insecurity (Edkins 2003). Insecurity, then, is central to the general practice of statecraft (Dowler and Sharp 2001; F. Smith 2001; Hyndman 2004b). Actions taken in the name of protecting citizen security create insecurities for targeted populations, often migrants, who may understand security quite differently than states and hierarchically dominant groups (Staeheli and Nagel 2008). Nevins argues, “the production of security for ‘us’ in terms of immigration control is inevitably tied to the production of insecurity for others, or ‘them’” (Nevins 2010, 196; Hyndman 2007; Staeheli and Nagel 2008). And especially with the post–September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11) adoption of the “homeland” security narrative, “the familial home/land is celebrated as a space of security” (Cowen and Gilbert 2008, 50; Kaplan 2003; Walters 2004). Through the depiction of the immigrant as Other, immigrants come to represent the inverse of, and a danger to, the American family, home, and way of life (Kaplan 200...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviationse
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 A Transnational Ethnography of U.S. Detention and Deportation
• Chapter 2 Ecuadorian Migration, U.S. Policy, and Human Smuggling
• Chapter 3 The Making of a Massive System
• Chapter 4 Ordering Chaos: System Organization and Operation
• Chapter 5 The “Peculiar” Advantages of Chaos: Detainees’ Experiences
• Chapter 6 “You Don’t Know How I Suffer, Waiting Every Day”: Reverberations of Detention in Ecuador
• Chapter 7 “There Is No Other Way”: Postdeportation Insecurities and Continued Migration
• Chapter 8 Ordering Chaos, Opening Space
• Appendix A Interviewed Functionaries
• Appendix B Interviewed Deportees, Basic Data
• Appendix C Deportee Interview Question Guide
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index