Deportation as a sacrament of the state: the religious instruction of contracted chaplains in U.S. detention facilities

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn family detention, religious practice does not stand alone as a faith free-zone, but rather unfolds within what Néstor Rodríguez and Cristian Paredes call ‘coercive bureaucracy’ that from its accumulative effect have a bearing on religious practices [(2014). “Coercive Immigration Enforcement and Bureaucratic Ideology.” In Constructing Illegality in America: Immigrant Experiences, Critiques, and Resistance, edited by Cecilia Menjívar and Daniel Kanstroom, 63–83. New York: Cambridge University Press, 70]. From a meta-narrative vantage point, the concentrated flows of asylum seekers from Central America to the United States have spawned a new era of detention and deportation religiosity. Amid the amorphous complexity of the present U.S. immigration context, religion can be found at the intersections of the coercive arm of the state and the private-detention industry. Here, several ethical issues arise as to the precise social contours of the religious services provided in state-contracted private-detention facilities such as making deportation as the only viable mode of liberation detainees have to envision. With a constraint on notions of liberation in family detention, religious single-parent families are forced to accept deportation as the religious practice of liberation or what I call, deportation as a sacrament of the state.