Immigration Detention System Research Articles

Weeping in the Playtime of Others: The Obama Administration's Failed Reform of ICE Family Detention Practices

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).

Weeping in the Playtime of Others: The Obama Administration's Failed Reform of ICE Family Detention Practices

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).

“Humane” Immigration Enforcement and Latina Immigrants in the Detention Complex

We explore the criminalization of Latina immigrants through the interwoven network of social control created by law, the justice system, and private corporations—the immigration industrial complex. Considerable scholarly research has focused on understanding the overtly coercive practices of deportation and the consequences for families and communities; less attention has been devoted to the social control mechanisms of detention facilities and “Alternative to Detention Programs” (ATD programs) operating in the United States. We know relatively little about the consequences for immigrant populations, especially of the purported “humane” practices in the enforcement apparatus. Based on existing documents produced by governmental offices, including Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, Government Accountability Office, nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, and private correctional facilities, we conducted semistructured interviews with 11 immigration lawyers who have access to women who are and/or have been detained, are in supervised ATD programs, are/were in deportation proceedings, or attempt(ed) to claim asylum. An examination of immigration confinement, especially the laws and policy decisions behind the exponential increase in these detentions, reveals important gender dynamics in these practices. The subtle and benevolence-signaling discourse evoking “family,” “motherhood,” and the care of children masks the harsh “business as usual” tactics that treat women and their children in ways indistinguishable from those used in the criminal justice system. We contend that this feminized and infantilized language functions to conceal widespread civil and human rights violations, physical and sexual violence, and mistreatment reproduced by the immigration detention system today.

The Human Cost of IIRIRA —Stories from Individuals Impacted by the Immigration Detention System

The 1996 passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) has had a devastating impact on immigrants who are detained, indigent, and forced to face deportation proceedings without representation (pro se). In the past 20 years, immigration detention has grown exponentially and a criminal–immigration detention–deportation pipeline has developed as a central function of the immigration system. Despite the growing specter of the “criminal alien” in the American psyche, there is little public knowledge or scrutiny of the vast immigration detention and deportation machine. Enforcement of IIRIRA has effectively erased human stories and narrowed immigration debates to numbers and statistics. The five vignettes below tell the stories of individuals who have personally experienced the impact of IIRIRA. Part 1 describes the on-the-ground reality of a state public defender's obligations and struggles to defend immigrants from harsh consequences of criminal convictions. Part 2 provides the perspective of an indigent immigrant fighting his deportation pro se. Part 3 describes a nonprofit immigration attorney's challenges in providing legal services to detained immigrants. Part 4 is a glimpse into the brisk pace of an immigration judge's detained docket. Part 5 tells the story of a detained immigrant's family member and the many hoops she must jump through to ensure he has a fighting chance in immigration court. Collectively, these vignettes provide a realistic picture of the immigration detention experience, revealing the human cost of IIRIRA.

When Is Immigration Detention Lawful? The Monitoring Practices of UN Human Rights Mechanisms

This Global Detention Project Working Paper details how the banalisation of immigration detention is contested by international human rights mechanisms. Since the creation of the United Nations, the global human rights regime has provided a framework for the protection of all people, including those living in foreign countries. This paper assesses how national sovereignty and access to territory is mitigated by the universal nature and applicability of human rights and refugee protection standards. The authors comprehensively describe the normative framework governing immigration detention established in core international treaties and discuss how human rights bodies apply this framework when reviewing states’ policies and practices. Their assessment of the impact and implementation of fundamental norms reveals gaps in the international protection regime and highlights how states’ responses to this regime have shaped contemporary immigration detention systems.

The Human Cost of IIRIRA — Stories from Individuals Impacted by the Immigration Detention System

The Human Cost of IIRIRA — Stories from Individuals Impacted by the Immigration Detention System

Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick

Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. viii, 331 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). The essays collected in Body and Nation approach twentieth-century depictions of bodies within the United States through a transnational lens. The relationship of the human body to the body politic has emerged in recent decades as a prominent node of historical and interdisciplinary analyses of national identity, and this volume provides a necessary but often-overlooked global context for US discourses of the body. Exploring the ways in which US body politics have been translated and refracted through political, military, and media engagements abroad, as well as the ways in which US national identity has been defined over and against the bodies of alien others, the essays illustrate the transnational vectors along which twentieth-century representations of bodies have moved. Along with an introduction and epilogue by the editors, Body and Nation contains twelve essays, ten of which have not been previously published. The essays are arranged simply in chronological order, although they focus broadly on three themes articulated in the introduction: the challenges of defining a national body in an age of imperialism and global migration; the relationship of the body to discourses of national security; and the depiction of the modern, national body in transnational mass media. Most if not all of the essays take up more than one of these themes. For example, the first essay in the collection, Paul A. Kramer's study of US military and domestic understandings of prostitution during the Philippine-American War, addresses the perceived dangers that the prostitute body presented to the US empire, to American military forces, and to the domestic nation and its citizens. The presence of regulated prostitution in the US-occupied Philippines only came to the attention of the American public through the efforts of journalists in the anti-colonialist, social purity, and suffragist presses, who saw in the practice a risk of miscegenation and immigration that would pollute the US population, disease that would weaken the US military, and sexual license that would soil US morality, among other concerns. Kramer's essay deftly establishes the myriad ways in which discourses of disease penetrating the body are intermingled with those of foreign customs and institutions invading the nation and empire, a focus thoughtfully mirrored in the final essay of the collection, Kristina Shull's history of the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba to Key West in 1980, following which fears regarding security, disease, and sexual deviance helped to give rise to the modern US immigration detention system. …

Moving Beyond Immigration Reform: A Call for Social Inclusion and to Change U.S. Foreign Policy

Moving Beyond Immigration Reform:A Call for Social Inclusion and to Change U.S. Foreign Policy Esther Portillo-Gonzales1 (bio) During the Summer of 2014 we witnessed the dramatic and heartbreaking images of unaccompanied children and entire families from Central America turning themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol. Most did so citing persecution by criminal organizations, which are a product of the U.S. Drug War in Mexico and Central America, as well as inhumane immigration policies, and decades of U.S. intervention in those countries. These migrants are pleading for asylum from the U.S. government and rightly so. Violence has rapidly spread in Mexico since 2008: over 100,000 people have been murdered and 25,000 disappeared.2 In Honduras between 2008 and 2012, the homicide rate went from 58 to 85 murders per 100,000 residents, making it the country with the highest murder rate in the world. And since the 2009 coup, femicides, the targeted killing of women, have increased by 62%.3 In Guatemala, femicides went from 213 reported in 2000 to 707 in 2012.4 The highest rate of femicide in the world is in El Salvador, where 12 women out of 100,000 are murdered.5 The increase in femicides in Central America explains why migrant women are making the journey to the U.S. alone or with their children. Despite mounting evidence that its policies fuel migration, the U.S. denies over 90% of asylum claims from Mexicans and Central Americans.6 Violence in Mexico and Central America is directly linked to the U.S.-led war on drugs and the logic of neoliberalism.7 The U.S. is directly implicated in this violence. Since 2008, it has spent $800 million on the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) and $2.4 billion on the security cooperation agreement, Plan Mérida.8 As a result of this aid, violence has only escalated and criminal organizations have become more powerful, better organized, and linked to corrupt government forces. Recently at a Central American regional forum, U.S. Vice President Joe (Joseph) Biden announced more support for military and public security forces and called for the consolidation of trade pacts such as the trade agreement DR-CAFTA to address development.9 While experts contend that corrupt security forces have eroded the human rights of its citizens, the U.S. continues to support military and security forces. The recent disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico and the bodies of many others discovered in mass graves are further evidence of indiscriminate repression against civilians at the hands of criminal organizations that collaborate with U.S. funded state forces. Despite the vast evidence of state violence in Mexico and Central America, the U.S. government has continued to systematically deport noncitizens to countries plagued by such organized violence. Under President Obama’s tenure, over two million people have been deported, including many parents of U.S. citizen children, throwing more than 5,000 children into the foster care system.10 The U.S. government incarcerates 34,000 people in privately managed immigration detention on any given day. Green card holders are mandatorily detained for past criminal convictions, deported, and barred from reentering the U.S. for at least ten years and often for life. In 2014, the practice of family detention returned to the U.S. immigration detention system, after being eliminated in 2007, and has grown by over 1,200% in the last six months.11 After hundreds of marches, sit-ins, and demands from grassroots groups, President Obama announced executive action on immigration in November 2014. The President’s executive action will not provide any form of permanent status for migrants, just temporary relief from being deported and only after taxes and fees are paid, and background checks come back clean. Executive action also calls for 20,000 more border patrol agents. There are still over six million undocumented residents who will be completely left out from any form of relief, and most of the migrants coming to the border seeking asylum will likely face mandatory detention. But most importantly, the immigration detention and deportation system will remain intact; there are...

The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration by David Bacon, and: Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas by David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin (review)

Reviewed by: The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration by David Bacon, and: Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas by David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin Alejandra Marchevsky (bio) The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration By David Bacon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. 328 pp. isbn 978-0807001615 Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas By David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 512 pp. isbn 978-0674729049 The mass movement of people around the Americas has been critical to racialized nation building since the 18th century, and has simultaneously produced transnational spaces of social and economic integration and state violence. These themes spring from David Bacon’s sweeping account of contemporary Mexican migration in The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon, 2013), and David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín’s historical-sociological book, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard UP, 2014). Bacon’s book foregrounds an argument that the prolific journalist and immigrant rights activists have advanced for years: The U.S. is not an unwitting recipient of Mexican immigration; instead, it is swallowing up Mexico’s human and natural resources, and has imposed neoliberal policies that have contributed to skyrocketing unemployment and poverty in Mexico. This has left millions of displaced poor Mexicans no choice but to migrate north. Bacon documents in exquisite prose how Mexico’s “great migration”—which peaked at 12.67 million Mexicans in the U.S. in 2008—was propelled by U.S. policies, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement. This epic exodus is explained through exhaustive details on the assault on Mexican workers. On the heels of NAFTA, Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Virginia-based meatpacking giant Smithfield Foods, displaced Veracruz agricultural workers who then migrated to the U.S. for the same type of jobs they had lost at home. Thanks to liberalized foreign investment and trade rules, Smithfield flooded Mexico with cheap, imported pork, and erected massive hog farms in Veracruz’s Perote Valley, bankrupting Mexican pork producers. Representatives from Granjas Carroll and municipal officials promised valley residents “modernization” and jobs. And yet, the few jobs that materialized locked workers out of corporate profit-sharing and extracted 12-hour workdays for as little as $55/week (9). Most Veracruz emigrants settled in U.S. agricultural towns like Tar Heel, North Carolina, where Smithfield employs mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants in the world’s largest slaughterhouse, and the tobacco industry imports H2A visa guest workers and undocumented workers from Veracruz to labor under some of the worst conditions in the country. The story of displacement repeats in Oaxaca, where the federal government transferred communal lands (ejidos) to multinational mining conglomerates. When residents protested land loss and ecological damage from industrial mining, foreign companies cynically offered them free toilets, and local police descended on demonstrators with dogs and guns (50). Home to 20 percent of Mexico’s indigenous population, Oaxaca has seen most of its young residents leave for work in other parts of Mexico and the U.S.: nearly half of its rural communities had negative growth between 1990 and 2000 (57). Bacon argues that capitalists and political elites from both nation-states have spurred migration through their destructive policies. Next, U.S. policymakers have created “illegal” people through laws that racialize and criminalize Mexican immigrants, an effect that produces vulnerable workers for U.S. employers. The second half of the book recounts the repression of Mexican immigrants through the buildup of border and interior enforcement, and the expansion of the immigration detention system. The Right to Stay Home centers the voices of activists with selected testimonios that follow each chapter: In Mississippi, Latino immigrants and the state’s legislative Black Caucus united to block anti-immigration bills that had swept legislatures in other southern states; in Los Angeles, [End Page 185] Latino janitors protested “silent...

Secure Communities, Priority Enforcement, and IDENT/IAFIS Interoperability: Recommendations for Effective Reform

This essay explores an immigration enforcement strategy known as IDENT/IAFIS Interoperability, comparing the strategy under its original Secure Communities structure, and under the recently-announced Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). In addition to Secure Communities and PEP, this paper discusses related enforcement programs, overall immigration enforcement goals, and the outcomes of recent enforcement efforts. The paper examines Constitutional challenges to the enforcement programs, and explores deeper issues related to the spectrum of state and local criminal laws, community trust in law enforcement, and dangers of the immigration detention system as it currently exists. Ultimately, this essay provides policy recommendations to address the challenges introduced by Secure Communities and the Priority Enforcement Program.

Mental distress and human rights of asylum seekers

Purpose – This paper studies the experiences of asylum seekers in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between mental wellbeing, living conditions, and Australia’s detention policies in light of human rights. Design/methodology/approach – Using grounded theory, data were collected via observations, semi-structured interviews, key-informant interviews, and document analysis. Participants included seven asylum seekers and three professionals working with them. Findings – In light of a human rights framework, this paper reports on the mental distress suffered by asylum seekers in detention, the environments of constraint in which they live, and aspects of detention centre policy that contribute to these environments. The findings highlight a discrepancy between asylum seekers’ experiences under immigration detention policy and Australia’s human rights obligations. Research limitations/implications – This research indicates human rights violations for asylum seekers in detention in Australia. This research project involved a small number of participants and recommends systemic review of the policy and practices that affect asylum seekers’ mental health including larger numbers of participants. Consideration is made of alternatives to detention as well as improving detention centre conditions. The World Health Organization’s Quality Rights Tool Kit might provide the basis for a framework to review Australia’s immigration detention system with particular focus on the poor mental wellbeing of asylum seekers in detention. Originality/value – This study links international human rights law and Australian immigration detention policies and practices with daily life experiences of suffering mental distress within environments of constraint and isolation. It identifies asylum seekers as a vulnerable population with respect to human rights and mental wellbeing. Of particular value is the inclusion of asylum seekers themselves in interviews.

Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System

Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System

Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System

Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System

In the Wake of Irregular Arrivals: Changes to the Canadian Immigration Detention System


 
 
 This article seeks to address the policies, practices, and conditions of immigration detention in Canada. The article surveys detention worldwide, its promulgation in Canada, and changes ushered in via 2012 policy innovations. Focusing on mandatory detention and its relationship to the Designated Countries of Origin policy, the article also demonstrates the disproportionality of the Canadian government’s response to recent arrivals of people migrating by boat. The article emphasizes the dangers of establishing mandatory detention provisions and questions the justifications provided by defenders of the policies. 
 
 

Refugee Hotels: The Discourse of Hospitality and the Rise of Immigration Detention in Canada

While serving as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada between 2008 and 2013, Jason Kenney likened the detention facilities used to house an increasing number of asylum seekers and non-status migrants to hotels. And yet, when addressing the responsibilities of citizenship, he repeatedly argued that “Canada is not a hotel.” However contradictory, Kenney’s references to hotels and, implicitly, to the comforts and privileges they represent, draw on the idea of Canadian hospitality: the suggestion is that we detain asylum seekers in hotels or hotel-like conditions because we are an hospitable people but that our reputation for hospitality leaves us vulnerable to migrants who construe themselves as hotel guests with privileges rather than citizens with responsibilities. Paying particular attention to recent legislative reforms that will almost certainly result in the incarceration of more asylum seekers, this article asks how Canadian hospitality is defined and practiced today. More generally, it uses discourse analysis to explore the tension between the Canadian ideal of hospitality and the realities of an expanding immigration detention system.

Invisible Spaces and Invisible Lives in Immigration Detention

The United States’ civil immigration detention system is characterized by an executive body, the Department of Homeland Security, which possesses substantial authority over the lives of migrants with limited oversight by Congress or the courts. Beginning with the “entry fiction” doctrine that concludes that some migrants who are physically present in the United States are not present for purposes of key constitutional protections, Congress and the courts have granted executive officials substantial flexibility in operating immigration detention sites. They have broad powers and impressive resources to detain migrants they suspect of having violated immigration laws. Migrants who seek release in the United States have a steep path to hew. Moreover, immigration detention centers are shielded from public scrutiny by a host of legislative and judicial decisions ranging from limitations on tort recovery to the inapplicability of transparency statutes. Immense resources and legal authority paired with a lack of penetrating legislative or judicial scrutiny has led to an immigration detention regime that is enormous and filled with abuse. Detainees frequently receive inadequate medical care, complaints about sexual abuse go unreported, and deaths are not uncommon. This Essay posits that the troubling state of immigration detention is a foreseeable — but not irreversible — consequence of these trends.

Performing Homeland Security within the US Immigrant Detention System

This paper examines the critical role played by the US immigrant detention and deportation apparatus in the construction of contemporary imaginaries of homeland security. I argue that the detention system works performatively by substantiating a paradoxical relationship between security and insecurity for system employees. Through research conducted in Ecuador with detained migrants' families and deported migrants, I scrutinize the behavior of detention personnel and the experiences of detainees. Data illustrate how the US detention system becomes an integral part of the governmental apparatus behind homeland security imaginaries. First, employees are disciplined through the constant repetition of narratives in which immigrants are immoral and untrustworthy. Second, the detention system is structured in such a way as to require employees to perceive detainees as sources of insecurity, through inconsistent policies, conditions of detention, and high volume and mobility of detainees. Consequently, I contend, employees' interactions with detainees play an important and under-recognized role in performing homeland security imaginaries by perpetuating and reinforcing negative tropes of immigrants as criminalized, dangerous outsiders. The paper contributes to understanding ways in which multiple and overlapping governmentalities work recursively in the country's immigration apparatus, as well as shedding light on the typically opaque detention and deportation process.

Behind the veil of philoxenia: The politics of immigration detention in Greece

This article sets out to summarise the policies, practices and experiences of immigration detention in contemporary Greece, as well as outlining how they have been critiqued domestically and internationally. The article proceeds to address the ways in which the Greek state has reacted to criticisms and pressures for reform, especially from abroad. It is argued that neither domestic nor international interventions have succeeded in bringing about substantive progressive change in the Greek immigration detention system. Rather, Greek state authorities have systematically neutralised criticisms by employing an array of rhetorical techniques, most notably through evocation of philoxenia (broadly meaning hospitality to foreigners and strangers more generally) as a natural trait common to all Greeks. In addition to highlighting the dubious and paradoxical dimensions of the rhetorical defences deployed by the state in Greece, particularly concerning its discourse of philoxenia, the article goes on to discuss the main socio-political functions that have subtly been served inside the country’s borders through maintenance of deplorable policies and practices of immigration detention, including the symbolic management of public anxieties in accordance with what may be termed the ‘more eligibility’ principle. In pointing to these functions, the article helps to explain why the Greek state persists in making use of rhetoric that is blatantly indefensible and bound to attract further disapprobation.

Realizing Liberty: The Use of International Human Rights Law to Realign Immigration Detention in the United States

This article takes a comprehensive look at the extensive U.S. immigration detention system from a human rights perspective. The article represents a first effort to synthesize and present recently-developed international human rights standards and apply those rules to the U.S. immigration detention system. It engages in an in-depth analysis to identify the changes necessary to realign U.S. law and scale back immigration detention in accord with international human rights law. The article proposes that U.S. courts should effect those changes through the interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions in light of the international human rights law standards. This use of the human rights standards is appropriate, because the standards represent binding obligations for the United States as a matter of international law and closely track U.S. constitutional law principles relating to civil detention in contexts less contentious than immigration. The article demonstrates how the application of international human rights law standards can bring rationality and humanity to U.S. immigration detention by revitalizing the right to liberty, which constitutes a core conception in both international human rights law and U.S. constitutional law.

Rethinking Pre-removal Immigration Detention in the United States: Lessons from Europe and Proposals for Reform

Relentless advocacy and powerful reporting have resulted in a growing outcry against the United States immigration detention system. Nevertheless, the system has experienced a dramatic growth in the last decade, affecting families and communities all over the country. Inspired by United States and international legal theory, this article critically examines the legality of lengthy detention of non-citizens held in pre-removal immigration detention in the United States, while presenting a comparative analysis of the European Union and four of its Member States. Following the