Site Fight! Toward the Abolition of Immigrant Detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and Everywhere Else)

Abstract

AbstractThis paper theorises the spatialisation of White supremacy through the siting and expansion of a US immigrant detention centre, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). This case reveals the spatial relationship between the detention centre’s displacement with the Seattle‐Tacoma region’s increasing wealth, highlighting the role of detention and incarceration in the spatialisation of White supremacy. If White advantage maps onto whiteness as property, then White supremacy maps onto interlocking systems of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that dispossess people of colour of land and turns their bodies into devalued pollution sinks, where the less‐than‐citizen is forced to live on Tar Pits that they cannot even call “home”. Since 2014, detained immigrants’ activism has fuelled conversations about the punitive nature of administrative immigrant detention, racial profiling, and the city’s responsibility to enforce health, safety and environmental regulations for all residents. Through the stories of detainees, deportees and their co‐conspirators, this site fight illustrates how abolition ecologies call for tearing down toxic detention centres. Beyond rejecting White supremacist logics in immigration enforcement, abolitionists make freedom as a place together.