Abstract
Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, this article examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism by the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As we reveal, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in Congress’s perception of asylum seekers. While lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. Lawmakers began describing asylum seekers as criminals or agents of infectious diseases in order to justify their detention, which then cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more broadly. Our analysis suggests that they may have emphasized the dangerousness of asylum seekers to resolve the dissonance between their theoretical commitments to asylum and their hesitance to welcome newcomers. In addition to this distinctive form of cognitive dissonance, we discuss a number of other implications of our research, including the ways in which the new penology framework figured into the changing discourse about detaining asylum seekers.
Highlights
In the past four decades, the number of noncitizens detained by the United States has grown at a staggering rate
While 1981–96 were formative years in the making of mass immigration detention in the United States, this period has often been overlooked in the literature
Drawing upon both media coverage and a wealth of administrative and legislative records from this period, our analysis reveals a dynamic interplay between Congress and the executive during the formative years of immigration detention
Summary
In the past four decades, the number of noncitizens detained by the United States has grown at a staggering rate. In 1985, the government detained an average of 3,380 noncitizens on a given day; in June 2019, this number exceeded 52,000 (Jefferis 2019). Immigration imprisonment was “reborn” in 1981 in response to the unexpected migration of more than 150,000 Cubans and Haitians (Simon 1998, 579). The detention of noncitizens was otherwise relatively rare during this period. In stark contrast to today, immigration authorities did not routinely detain noncitizens after a final deportation order was entered, even when the reason for deportation was a criminal. The authors would like to thank Jonathan Simon, Taeku Lee, Leti Volpp, Irene Bloemraad, Kevin Quinn, Sarah Barringer Gordon, and Sophia Lee for their comments on this manuscript. We are grateful to Margaret Taylor for generously sharing archival resources, and to Emma Clark and Samantha Ho for their outstanding research assistance
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