Crisis, subjectivity, and the polymorphous character of immigrant family detention in the United States

Policy Statement on the Incarceration of Undocumented Migrant Families: Society for Community Research and Action Division 27 of the American Psychological Association.

Shifts in migration and border control policies may increase the likelihood of trauma exposure related to child–parent separation and result in costs to the health system and society. In the present study, we estimated direct and indirect costs per child as well as overall cohort costs of border control policies on migrant children and adolescents who were separated from their parents, detained, and placed in the custody of the United States following the implementation of the 2018 Zero Tolerance Policy. Economic modeling techniques, including a Markov process and Monte Carlo simulation, based on data from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network's Core Data Set (N = 458 migrant youth) and published studies were used to estimate economic costs associated with three immigration policies: No Detention, Family Detention, and Zero Tolerance. Clinical evaluation data on mental health symptoms and disorders were used to estimate the initial health state and risks associated with additional trauma exposure for each scenario. The total direct and indirect costs per child were conservatively estimated at $33,008, $33,790, and $34,544 after 5 years for No Detention, Family Detention, and Zero Tolerance, respectively. From a health system perspective, annual estimated spending increases ranged from $1.5 million to $14.9 million for Family Detention and $2.8 million to $29.3 million for Zero Tolerance compared to baseline spending under the No Detention scenario. Border control policies that increase the likelihood of child and adolescent trauma exposure are not only morally troubling but may also create additional economic concerns in the form of direct health care costs and indirect societal costs.

The U.S. Immigration Crisis and a Call for the Church's Lifeworld Politics: Why Should Hauerwas Collaborate with Habermas on the U.S. Immigration Crisis? Ilsup Ahn Introduction: Saying “No” to the State's Biopolitics Against the Undocumented Migrants According to the recent survey report published by the Washington, D.C.‐based Public Religion Research Institute, throughout 2013, there has been consistent bipartisan and cross‐religious support for creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the United States. While 14 percent percent of Americans support allowing undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents but not citizens, 63 percent favor providing a way for immigrants who are currently living in the United States without legal documentation to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements. They also discovered that nearly two‐thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. immigration system is either completely broken (34 percent) or mostly broken but working in some areas (31 percent). The report also shows that 41 percent of Americans believe immigration policy should be an immediate priority for President Obama and Congress, while roughly as many (42 percent) say it should be a priority during the next couple of years. Interestingly enough, only 14 percent of Americans say it should not be a priority at all. Despite the majority of the U.S. citizens favor some sort of comprehensive immigration reform, the Congress has failed to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul to date largely due to the House Republican leaders, who recently unveiled their principles for an overhaul for the nation's immigration laws. These principles, however, do not clarify whether most undocumented immigrants would ever be able to become legal residents or U.S. citizens, while they would require tighter border security and more interior immigration enforcements. These principles seem to reiterate the problematic anti‐immigration mantra to continuously militarize our borders as well as to criminalize undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration has been increasingly criticized in regard to the inhumane deportation of many undocumented people, especially those parents whose children are U.S. citizens. Critiques argue that President Obama has overseen record levels of deportations, with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) repatriating about 2 million undocumented people since he took office in January 2009 (roughly 400,000 a year or 1,100 per day). Amid the increasing political turmoil relating to the immigration reform, the public media begin to notice that the real winners in immigration control are the prison industry. The Atlantic, for example, reports that since 2003, when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was created and government crackdowns on undocumented aliens increased, private prisons have gained business, with industry profits more than doubling. Damon Hininger, CEO of CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), said during a conference call with investors in May 2010 that between 2007 and 2009, when earnings for the S&P dropped by 28 percent, the company's earnings drew by 18 percent. According to The Atlantic, the government spends more than $2 billion a year on immigration detention, while spending only $72 million on alternatives to detention. It also reports that the private prison industry, such as CCA, has spent more than $1 million on lobbying. Although private prisons say that their lobbying efforts are aimed at promoting their services, not shaping immigration policy, immigrant advocates argue that the private prison industry is always lobbying for more detention beds. Given that the cost of detaining an immigrant averages $159 a day and half of 34,000 beds are operated by private prison corporations, it is not difficult to see the connection between the interests of the private prison corporations such as CCA and the Geo Group and the criminalization of undocumented migrants. According to Lee Fang of The Nation, the controversial Arizona SB1070 was developed in consultation with private prison lobbyists through a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Unfortunately, as Aubrey Pringle reports, several pending immigration bills would increase the number of incarcerated immigrants even more. The ongoing political struggles related to the increasing border militarization, the widespread criminalization of undocumented migrants, and the massive deportation of undocumented parents are the explicit exemplification of what philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call the...

Reproductive Injustice at the Southern Border and Beyond: An Analysis of Current Events and Hope for the Future.

While international law protects the rights of individuals to seek asylum and to be treated humanely and with dignity, immigration detention, the practice of confining individuals accused of violating immigration law, has surfaced as a growing response to the large numbers of individuals and families on the move throughout the world in search of freedom, safety, and economic security. Detention has long been used as a strategy for enforcement of immigration laws across the globe, and has also been used as a tactic to dissuade and control future migration. The detention of immigrants consistently presents concerns about and allegations of civil and human rights violations and negative bio-psycho-social impacts on those detained. Given the contemporary expansion of the immigration detention system in the United States, this bibliography will focus primarily on the context of immigration detention within the United States. This bibliography includes selected scholarly resources from the social sciences, health, and legal fields to present an overview of immigration detention, the impact on survivors of violence and trauma, and detention alternatives. While the Global Detention Project and other nonprofit organizations aim to track the scope of immigration detention worldwide, numbers of individuals detained, as well as the number and location of detention facilities, immigration detention remain difficult to track. In the United States, the average daily population of immigration detention facilities in the United States had increased from 6,785 in 1994 to more than 38,000 in 2017. That number has risen to closer to 50,000 in recent years and manifests across a wide variety of facilities, including temporary and long-term holding facilities operated by a host of federal, state, local, and private for-profit entities. The US government has broad, though not absolute, power over immigration and immigration detention. Authorization of the detention of immigrants dates back to 1798 with the Alien Enemies Act, which allowed for the detention of immigrants from “hostile” countries during times of war. As of 1875, another series of laws expanded the framework of detention, in particular pertaining to the incarceration of individuals with criminal convictions. Further changes were made in 1952 with the Immigration and Nationality Act, then more drastically in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which served to begin a decades-long expansion of the US immigration detention system. This expansion has also led to numerous allegations of civil and human rights violations related to due process, exploitative labor practices, sexual and physical abuse, and inadequate medical care, as well as growing concern about the impact of immigration detention on survivors of violence and trauma, particularly children, women, and LGBTQ communities. The author would like to acknowledge the significant contributions of Jessenia Herzberg in researching and reviewing literature on immigration detention.

In May 2006, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began detaining noncitizen families at the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former medium-security prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America. In April 2007, a group of lawyers sued DHS, arguing that Hutto's conditions violated children's rights. This article first situates family detention in relation to two relatively separate literatures – immigration geopolitics and children's rights – and legal precedent. Second, it shows how noncitizen children are framed more as ‘child-objects’ in immigration law than agential, liberal subjects. Immigration law figures adults, however, as criminalized migrant-subjects, ineligible for the due process on which liberal legal regimes are based. The article then analyzes how the judge balanced ‘irreparable harm’ to detained children, the ‘public interest’, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) discretion to detain noncitizens. Relying upon ‘geostrategic discourses’ of external threat and internal safety, the judge argued that US detention represents a safe space compared to families' countries of origin. Twisting national security with the ‘best interests of the child’, the judge authorized a legal framework for family detention, but with specific spatial requirements. In turn, this new alignment of sovereign and children's rights expanded ICE's power to detain noncitizens. These legal, discursive and spatial tactics form what is called here a geopolitics of vulnerability in which ICE seeks to displace national (in)securities onto detained families. Tracing the intersections of children's legal subjectivity and immigration, the article illuminates deeper struggles over executive power, the spatial practices of immigration enforcement and immigration law.

The year 2018 saw a moral panic in the United States in the media and among many citizens over the treatment of refugees/asylees at the U.S. southern border, particularly the separation and detention of children apart from their parents. This happened in the context of a period in U.S. political history in which “immigration,” without much discernment about different types of immigration, was central to political discourse. In fact, in terms of numbers, there was no immigration crisis at the border. Undocumented migration from Mexico across the southern border of the United States has been in decline for many years, and the irregular movement of people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras is currently small by historical standards. The only crisis, to which the U.S. panic was a response, has been a human rights crisis. Families and children seeking asylum from horrendous civil‐rights conditions in their countries of origin were criminalized and denied their right to asylum hearings. The panic points both to the extreme politicization of immigration in the United States, particularly since Donald Trump's entry into national politics in 2015, and to popular confusion over categorizing different types of immigrants. But it also raises questions about the nature of the U.S. southern border in relation to the United States’ place in the world. Rather than thinking about the United States as simply the rich destination country of unfortunate people coming from poor origin countries, the refugee panic of 2018 brings into the focus the fact that the United States itself is complicit in the conditions in those countries that produce so many refugees in the first place.

Time in detention

U nlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System addresses one of the most troubled features of the US immigration system and highlights the need for fundamental changes to it. The report comes six years since the inception of the Obama administration’s detention reform initiative. In the interim, the number of immigrant detainees per year has risen to more than 400,000, the administration has opened immense new family detention centers, and the overwhelming majority of persons in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have remained in prisons, jails and other secure facilities where they are subject to standards designed for criminal defendants and, in many ways, treated more harshly than criminals. The report’s overarching recommendation is that the US immigrant detention system be dismantled and replaced with a network of supervised release, case management, and community support programs, designed to ensure court appearances. It recognizes that detention may be necessary for short periods and in certain cases, but it rejects detention as a central immigrant “management” tool, and argues that detention should only be used as a last resort if less harmful strategies and programs—viewed on a continuum beginning with the least restrictive and moving to release programs with different levels of supervision, monitoring, and support—cannot reasonably ensure court appearances or (in rare cases) protect the public. It opposes the detention of pregnant and nursing women, bona fide asylum seekers, the very ill, the disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable persons. It calls for the substantial contraction of detention facilities and “bed space.” As the first step in this process, the report urges Congress to commission a comprehensive study on the benefits, challenges, cost, and time frame for creating a civil immigration detention system. It also proposes that the administration create a full menu of court compliance programs, with varying degrees of supervision, reporting, oversight and monitoring. In order to realize this vision, it offers several additional recommendations. T he Obama administration should desist from using detention as a “deterrent” to illegal migration and de facto refugee flows . DHS should close its family detention centers in favor of community-based supervision and support programs for immigrant families. The vast majority of families would appear for removal proceedings with appropriate orientation, supervision and community support. The growth of an immense family detention infrastructure will not (as intended) deter imperiled persons from seeking refuge in the United States, but will invariably lead to the return of de facto refugees to their persecutors in violation of international law. C ongress should pass legislation to repeal mandatory detention in all but the most egregious criminal and national security cases . US mandatory detention laws cover lawful permanent residents, asylum seekers, petty offenders, and persons with US families and other enduring ties to the United States. By definition, they prevent individualized release determinations based on family ties, employment, housing, criminal history, and other factors. In the overwhelming majority of cases, immigration judges or judicial officers should be permitted to consider the full range of equities and release options for persons in removal proceedings, whether formal court proceedings or non-court, administrative and summary processes. P r ivate corporations should have a more limited, regulated and modest role in a shrinking detention system . The federal government has increasingly ceded responsibility for detention to entities whose loyalties run to their shareholders, not the common good. By some estimates, for-profit prison corporations administer more than 60 percent of the “beds” in the US immigrant detention system. Rather than expanding its reliance on for-profit prison companies, the federal government ought to decrease the use of detention, develop greater government expertise, and strengthen oversight of private contractors. D etention reform should include a significant expansion of Alternative to Detention programs (ATD) . Detention should only be used sparingly, for brief periods (when necessary), and as a last resort when less restrictive strategies cannot reasonably ensure appearances during the adjudication and removal process and cannot protect the public. ATD programs can offer effective, humane alternatives to detention. However, they should not be used to expand detention capacity. Like detention, intensive reporting and monitoring programs can stigmatize and incapacitate persons. If necessary, ATD programs should be treated as a form of custody, which would open them to mandatory detainees. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should undertake a comprehensive analysis of its information systems . The proposed review should identify the information ICE tracks on those who are subject to its custody; how, when, and which officials collect, enter, and can access this information; its quality control procedures; and the accessibility of information to congressional oversight committees, government watchdog agencies, relevant ICE officials, and the public. D etained immigrants—those who do not qualify for release or ATD programs—should be held in non-penal settings which reflect the conditions of normal life to the extent feasible . DHS should provide generous access to international organizations, faith-based groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the press, to all of its facilities. Immigration judges should adjudicate removal cases now handled through administrative, informal and non-court processes, and should make release and custody determinations soon after their detention for all persons in DHS custody . They should also regularly revisit custody decisions for detainees. However, these responsibilities—added to an immense yearly workload and a daunting backlog of more than 440,000 cases—will require increases in funding and staffing by an order of magnitude. As it stands, the immigration court system receives less than two percent of the combined funding of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE. The cost of “right-sizing” the immigration court system may well be offset by reductions in DHS detention funding and diminished federal court expenses from habeas corpus petitions. U nrepresented, indigent persons in removal proceedings should be provided with legal representation at the government’s expense . As numerous studies have revealed, legal counsel is one of the most important factors, even more important than the strength of the underlying legal claim, in influencing asylum and other case outcomes. Representation also increases court appearance rates and leads to decreased overall costs to the government due to reduced use of detention, more efficient court proceedings, and less frequent placement of the children of detainees in foster care. More importantly, it contributes to the right decisions being made under the law. Migration and Refugee Services of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (MRS/USCCB) and the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) approach the detention of immigrants from a pastoral perspective. Each day US Catholic institutions minister to detained immigrants, represent them in removal proceedings, tend to the material and spiritual needs of their families, and witness the pain of traumatized children and the anguish of divided families. Because of the detention system’s devastating effect on the lives of millions of persons each year, MRS/USCCB and CMS strongly support the transformation of this system and urge the Obama administration and Congress to proceed with the proposed reforms with all deliberate haste.

The United States has long struggled with the practice of detaining immigrant families and over time, most reform efforts have flagged, if not failed. This paper examines the impact of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) through an exploration of the evolution of the family residential center (FRC) for families in immigration custody, established prior to the 9/11 terrorist attack by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and expanded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its aftermath. The paper provides an inside look at how policymakers, at various points in the Obama administration, sought to roll back its most infirm practices and the fate of those efforts. It begins with a brief history of family detention in the United States, continues with a summary of the reforms undertaken both early and late in the Obama administration, and examines the significant challenges it faced and the less progressive positions it adopted during its first and second terms in office. The paper concludes with a discussion of reasons for the rapid reversal of its previous reforms and provides recommendations to achieve a civil, civil system of immigration enforcement for families and all others, which means nothing less than the transformation of the immigrant detention system from a criminal to a civil paradigm, consistent with the population and legal authorities.2 The need for such an effort is all the more urgent in light of executive actions taken in the early days of the Trump administration and their initial outcomes. Among those thwarting admissions are orders to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to seal the US borders, shun refugees fleeing from war-torn regions until “extreme vetting” measures are put into place, and reassess others who have already been issued visas. Additional orders issued to ICE expanded and expedited the removal of persons whose conduct could result in charges or convictions as well as those with criminal charges or convictions, resulting in a 38 percent increase in arrests by ICE agents within the first 100 days of the Trump administration (Dickerson 2017b; Duara 2017).

1.INTRODUCTION Immigration and border enforcement is a contentious political issue in the United States. The existence .of over 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States, with 62% being from Mexico, has led to stricter border enforcement over the years (Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker 2010). An example of this was the law passed by the state of Arizona requiring police to detain anyone who they reasonably suspect may be an illegal immigrant (Archibold 2010). While the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled against many facets of this law, the initial passing of the law shows how important immigration is as an issue, especially for states in the West where the majority of illegal Mexican immigrants are located. Immigration was a major campaign issue for Obama and Romney in the 2012 presidential election. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, the United States has increased the number of border watch hours by an average of 10% per year (Mexican Migration Project 2012). The coal of increased enforcement has been to reduce the number of illegal immigrants entering, the United States from Mexico. This increased border enforcement has been prompted by policy makers' (and their constitutents') concerns about the impact of illegal immigration on the employment of native workers, crime, and public spending (Borjas 1999; Dodson 2001; Enchautegui 1997). Despite the intent of the legislation, the post-IRCA time period has seen a dramatic increase in the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border (Hanson and Spilimbergo 1999). The number of apprehensions from 1980 to 2008 is shown in Figure 1. The majority of these are from the Mexico-U.S. border. While these numbers may appear to be rather large, many of these are repeaters. This is because of the -revolving door nature of border enforcement (Durand 1994). Immigrants who are caught trying to illegally enter the United States are apprehended and dropped back in Mexico where they are free to attempt the crossing again. Studies have found the probability of apprehension to be consistently around 1 in 3 (Massey and Espinosa 1997: Massey and Singer 1995). While would-be immigrants are free to attempt another crossing. each crossing does pose significant dangers from both criminals and the elements. Eschbach et al. (1999) and Cornelius (2001) both discuss the dangers faced by people attempting to cross the border. Increased border enforcement and .apprehensions may be good, however, for one group of people: coyotes. Coyotes are smugglers who are paid to illegally bring people over the border from Mexico to the United States. (1) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The agricultural migration to the United States tends to be short term, with migrants working in the United States and then returning home to Mexico in the off-season. Even nonagricultural workers have engaged in repeated attempts, apprehensions, and short-term stays in the United States. If coyote use makes entering the United States too expensive or difficult then immigrants may choose to stay in the United States during the off-season. Given the large stock of Mexican immigrants already in the United States, moves to strengthen the border even further may not actually reduce the stock of illegal immigrants in the United States and could actually increase it. There are strong policy reasons to reduce the usage of coyotes, other than migration duration. The coyote industry has changed significantly over the years. Some of these changes have involved using new technology such as cell phones to remotely guide migrants across the border (Lacey 2011). However, other changes in the coyote business have been troubling. Mexican cartels such as the Gulf and Zetas have large-scale operations along the U.S. border. Coyotes now have to pay tolls to these criminal organizations in order to smuggle people through their territory (Beaubian 2011). These gangs also kidnap illegal immigrants who. …

The United States has long struggled with the practice of detaining immigrant families and over time, most reform efforts have flagged, if not failed. This paper examines the impact of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) through an exploration of the evolution of the family residential center (FRC) for families in immigration custody, established prior to the 9/11 terrorist attack by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and expanded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its aftermath. The paper provides an inside look at how policymakers, at various points in the Obama administration, sought to roll back its most infirm practices and the fate of those efforts. It begins with a brief history of family detention in the United States, continues with a summary of the reforms undertaken both early and late in the Obama administration, and examines the significant challenges it faced and the less progressive positions it adopted during its first and second terms in office.The paper concludes with a discussion of reasons for the rapid reversal of its previous reforms and provides recommendations to achieve a civil, civil system of immigration enforcement for families and all others, which means nothing less than the transformation of the immigrant detention system from a criminal to a civil paradigm, consistent with the population and legal authorities.[1] The need for such an effort is all the more urgent in light of executive actions taken in the early days of the Trump administration and their initial outcomes. Among those thwarting admissions are orders to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to seal the US borders, shun refugees fleeing from war-torn regions until “extreme vetting” measures are put into place, and reassess others who have already been issued visas. Additional orders issued to ICE expanded and expedited the removal of persons whose conduct could result in charges or convictions as well as those with criminal charges or convictions, resulting in a 38 percent increase in arrests by ICE agents within the first 100 days of the Trump administration (Dickerson 2017b; Duara 2017). [1] For further discussion of the concept of a civil, civil system of immigration enforcement, see Schriro (2009).

The proliferation of immigration detention around the world has been accompanied by growing interest in, and critical attention to, this policy and practice amongst academics, activists, policymakers, journalists and members of the general public. Challenging Immigration Detention—a collection edited by Michael J. Flynn and Matthew B. Flynn—is a helpful addition to the international discussion and debate about migrant detention (see e.g. recent edited collections by Nethery and Silverman 2015; Furman et al. 2016; Conlon and Hiemstra 2017). What sets this volume apart is its focus on the complicated question of how to challenge the policy and practice of detention while also working to make it less harmful for those who are detained. Comprising 14 chapters along with an introduction and conclusion, the collection covers a range of issues, perspectives and jurisdictions, with contributors who are (as the book’s subtitle indicates) academics, activists and policymakers. Topics include deaths in detention and family detention in the United States; inspecting detention in the United Kingdom; youth-activist infiltrations of detention centres in the United States; international advocacy and alternatives to detention; legal frameworks in South America, the European Union and other countries of the Global North; and the provision of mental health care in Australian detention facilities.

The modern instantiation of migrant family detention in the United States has resulted in the creation of carceral spaces in which conflict and care intermingle in everyday encounters. While legal advocates traversing these spaces offer critical aid to the detained, asylum-seeking parents and children confined within, legal advocacy is rarely recognized as caregiving work. Drawing from my ethnographic research with voluntary legal advocates working at family detention facilities in South Texas, this article demonstrates the potential for deploying a lens of care to such encounters, which I ultimately frame as “legal care.” I argue that cross-disciplinary conceptualizations of care, which emphasize its interdependency, relationality, and contested terrains (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), as well as its practices as being marked by a continuous tinkering (Mol 2010), offer windows to reconfigurations of care and power that reside amid both the mundane and unpredictable frictions that characterize these environments.

The debate surrounding immigration reform to address undocumented Latino immigrants in the United States has been emotionally charged and polarizing. This study’s goal was to better understand some of the psychological predictors of attitudes toward undocumented Latino immigrants in the United States, namely, collective identity as an American, group-level narcissism, and their interaction. A university sample ( N = 223) completed an online survey measuring attitudes toward undocumented Latino immigrants. As anticipated, we found that, at mean and high (but not low) levels of group narcissism, national in-group identification was a significant predictor of attitudes toward undocumented Latino immigrants. The implications of these findings, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed in light of the current debate on undocumented immigration in the United States.