Transnational productions of remoteness: building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders

A Mountz,J Loyd

doi:10.5194/gh-69-389-2014

Abstract

Abstract. This article examines transnational framings of domestic carceral landscapes to better understand the relationship between offshore and onshore enforcement and detention regimes. US detention on mainland territory and interception and detention in the Caribbean serves as a case study. While the US domestic carceral regime is a subject of intense political debate, research, and activism, it is not often analyzed in relation to the development and expansion of an offshore "buffer zone" to intercept and detain migrants and asylum seekers. Yet the US federal government has also used offshore interception and detention as a way of controlling migration and mobility to its shores. This article traces a Cold War history of offshore US interception and detention of migrants from and in the Caribbean. We discuss how racialized crises related to Cuban and Haitian migrations by sea led to the expansion of an intertwined offshore and onshore carceral regime. Tracing these carceral geographies offers a more transnational understanding of contemporary domestic landscapes of detention of foreign nationals in the United States. It advances the argument that the conditions of remoteness ascribed frequently to US detention sites must be understood in more transnational perspective.

Highlights

Western governments employ interception and offshore “processing” of asylum claims that lengthen the distance between migrants and asylum seekers and the boundaries of sovereign territory
The lengthy detention of asylum seekers, which varied by nationality, contributed to the space the government needed for confinement
In 1990, people were detained for an average of 23 days, but Haitians were held at Krome for an average of 101 days, and Salvadorans between 21 and 92 days, depending on the facility (GAO, 1992:25, 27)

Summary

Introduction

Western governments employ interception and offshore “processing” of asylum claims that lengthen the distance between migrants and asylum seekers and the boundaries of sovereign territory. No one dynamic accounts for the dispersed geography of places where migrants are detained Rather, this is a story about the confluence of a number of geopolitical and domestic events in the late Cold War and immediate post-Cold War era: implementation of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, the use of detention as deterrent, restructuring of US military spaces, and rapid expansion of US carceral landscapes onshore and offshore. After reviewing conceptual framings for understanding transnational productions of remoteness, we turn to the underappreciated 1980s history of interception and detention expansion in the Caribbean and US southeast, which set the stage for today’s detention landscape This geography illustrates the close ties between offshore interception and detention, and highlights the onshore detention infrastructures that facilitate deportation

Producing remoteness through transnational carceral regimes

Case study: island Caribbean to Louisiana

Contingency planning and deterrence onshore

Understanding remoteness in transnational context

Conclusions