By the time Diego Rivera Osorio was three years old he was already a veteran of immigration prisons. He had spent most of his life locked inside the Berks Family Residential Center, or “baby jail,” as critics call the one-hundred-bed facility northwest of Philadelphia where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confines mothers and their children. Two years earlier, Diego’s mother, Wendy Osorio Martinez, had fled threats of kidnapping and assault in Honduras, bringing Diego with her to seek asylum in the United States. “We came here because the United States is safe. It has laws,” Wendy said.1 But on crossing the Mexican border in 2015, they were caught by Border Patrol agents and sent to the Berks facility.
An hour away, Judge Walter Durling heard the deportation cases of many Berks families in the York, Pennsylvania, immigration court. A former Marine and government lawyer, Judge Durling was no bleeding heart. He denied three-quarters of all asylum applications he decided, well above the 57 percent national average. Over a period of two years, Judge Durling saw Diego on his docket sheet several times, and even to him, Diego was a different story. Diego, the judge wrote in August 2017, “has gone from diapers to detention in his young life with no understanding or exposure to life beyond secure custody.” In that time, Diego had won a special visa for children, but the federal government didn’t relent, and it still tried to deport him. With the help of pro bono lawyers, he resisted long enough for a federal appeals court to take his side.2 Wendy didn’t have an easy time either. Her asylum application was turned down. Fearing return to Honduras, she continued asking courts to reconsider.
While the wheels of justice slowly turned, Diego and Wendy remained in Berks until, finally, Judge Durling ordered their release, noting that, in his short life, Diego had spent 650 days in jail “with no end in sight.” That night, sitting inside a Mexican restaurant at a table so high he could barely reach the food, Diego ate the first meal outside Berks that he could remember. Now mother and child live with a relative in Houston, waiting for the courts to decide their fate.
Diego’s situation is alarming, but it’s not unique.
I grew up in South Texas, four hours south of San Antonio in the southeast corner of the state, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hot, poor, and overwhelmingly Mexican, and in the 1980s it was a hub for newly arrived migrants. In particular, Central Americans fleeing civil wars made their way to the Rio Grande Valley by the tens of thousands. Working with Congress, the Reagan administration responded with money, federal law enforcement officers, and immigration prisons. The Valley became an immigration battleground.
In the farmworker housing project where my family lived, Reagan administration directives were not distant policy debates. They were life-and-death developments about people we knew: relatives, friends, friends of friends. As a child, I experienced the rise of a security-focused immigration policy mostly through overhearing adult conversations. Sometimes it took the form of a tío, an uncle, sleeping on a couch as he rested on his way up north. Other times it was my parents worrying about whether my grandfather’s English was good enough to get him across the border. In the days before passports were required to get into the United States, his U.S. citizenship didn’t guarantee he could return.
By the time I was a newly minted lawyer, I thought I was familiar with the region’s role in the story of U.S. immigration, but it wasn’t until I drove down Farm-to-Market Road 510 for the first time that I entered a part of the immigration-law world that I hadn’t known existed.
Every year, thousands of mostly white retirees take the out-of-the-way two-lane FM 510 to the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge to see the animals: the snow-white egrets, the redhead ducks, the bobcats, even the ocelot—recently hovering near extinction—making their homes in the thickets of native bamboo. At the same time, migrants unwillingly travel the same route. Forced onto buses emblazoned with the Department of Homeland Security’s seal—an eagle clutching an olive branch in one talon and arrows in another—migrants peer out from behind dark windows and through metal bars. It’s a prison on wheels delivering migrants to the Port Isabel Detention Center, a 1,200-bed facility tucked between the wildlife refuge, a crop-duster airport, and the salty edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
The wild beauty stops at the facility’s guardhouse, where standard-issue prison architecture begins: chain-link fencing, concertina razor wire, layer after layer of security screenings, and steel doors. Inside, migrants are handed jumpsuits color-coded to reflect their security classification: yellow for people who present a low security risk, blue for medium, and red for high-risk migrants. From year to year or facility to facility, the colors change, but the rationale for them doesn’t: there’s no one here who doesn’t present a risk. Walking through metal detectors, with the heavy doors clanking shut behind me, accompanied by a guard and constantly watched through surveillance cameras, even I—an attorney waiting to meet a client—seem to pose a risk.
After days or months there, the migrants are brought into a small, windowless room and ushered onto long benches. At the front of the room, a judge presides over dozens of hearings five days a week. When I made trips to Port Isabel to represent people who were locked up there, Judge Howard Achtsam ran things. Migrants called him El Diablo—The Devil—because he deported just about everyone who walked into his courtroom. These days El Diablo works out of a nearby immigration court, but things remain tough for the Port Isabel detainees. Adding to the misery of confinement, almost all have to make their case for staying in the United States without a lawyer. In civil immigration court, there is no right to a government-paid lawyer. If you have the money, you can hire one. If you don’t, you’re out of luck.
Gerardo Armijo was one of the few who did have a lawyer—my brother, who, along with our eldest brother, heads the law firm I’ve been part of since my days as a new lawyer. I have a lot in common with Jerry, as his friends call him. We were both raised in the Texas borderlands about an hour west of Port Isabel. We were born into a community that is almost entirely Mexican. We are both Spanish speakers whose families have traversed the border.
There we part ways. I was born in Texas; Jerry in Mexico. I’m a U.S. citizen; brought to the United States by his mother when he was just eight months old, Jerry is a permanent resident—the final rung before citizenship, but crucially a step below the citizen status I was born into. Despite that, the United States is in his heart. While I finished high school and went off to the Ivy League, Jerry joined the Army. While I studied in plush libraries, he walked the streets of Iraq.
Patrolling in a tank one day, Jerry lost several friends to a bomb explosion. He survived, but the attack took its toll. “I got back to the Valley, and I was messed up,” he told me, his soft-spoken words revealing a soul torn between patriotism and trauma. When he returned to his South Texas home, the trauma proved too much for the Purple Heart veteran, and he turned to drugs. Jerry was convicted of possession and placed in a special state-run rehab program for veterans. The combination of drug treatment, job training, counseling, and lenient sentencing for crimes was meant to get vets back on their feet—a thank you of sorts for their military service—and Jerry was meeting all the program requirements. Then, one day, he suddenly stopped showing up. No one, not his family, his friends, not even his lawyer, knew where he was. It turned out that he had been arrested by ICE and sent to the Port Isabel Detention Center. No one had bothered to tell his lawyer or the judge overseeing the rehab program.
Cases like Jerry’s highlight how far reaching immigration imprisonment has become. His military service proved his love for the United States, but to immigration law, it’s the passport, not the heart, that matters. The direct link between Jerry’s warzone trauma and his criminal activity makes him unusual, but not unique. No one is sure how many veterans have been thrown into immigration prisons because of crimes linked to his experiences in combat. War affects citizen and noncitizen soldiers alike. For migrants who join the military, though, combat-induced mistakes shred the hero status veterans return home to and turn them into what politicians—both Democrats and Republicans—like to call “criminal aliens.” In this, Jerry is indistinguishable from many people detained across the immigration prison network: longtime residents of the United States convicted of a crime who end up inside an immigration prison, waiting while they fight the government’s efforts to deport them.
The rules that determine who gets locked up and who doesn’t are a legal labyrinth. Most immigration prisoners face government claims that they don’t belong in the United States—civil proceedings in which civil infractions are determined and where the power of criminal law is never invoked. Under this system, people who do not have the federal government’s permission to be in the United States can be detained. Near Mexico, Border Patrol agents walk the brushland of South Texas and the deserts of Arizona. In cities far from the border, ICE officers swoop into workplaces and knock on doors, waking people while it’s still dark. They have legal authority to arrest anyone whom they suspect of being in the United States without the required documentation. Come here to work, but find yourself in the factory when ICE shows up, and you can be detained. Come here fleeing for your life and present yourself to a Border Patrol agent, like many of the families whose stories have dominated the news cycle under President Barack Obama in 2014 and again under President Donald Trump in 2018 and 2019, and you can wind up on the wrong side of the chain-link fencing and razor-tipped concertina wire.
Yet having permission to be here isn’t necessarily a guarantee of freedom. Immigration officers can also arrest anyone who came here for a temporary stint with the government’s permission, and then stayed. And they can arrest anyone like Jerry, whom immigration lawyers refer to as a lawful permanent resident but most everyone else calls a green-card holder. He has the right to live and work in the United States indefinitely—even to drive U.S. tanks in U.S. wars—until he crosses paths with the criminal justice system.
Arrest marks the beginning of a legal process that often takes years to complete. People caught by ICE and accused of clandestine entry can go before an immigration judge, as do permanent residents with their varied lives, their jobs, financial struggles, families, and traumas. People apprehended near the border who can’t prove that they have been in the United States longer than two weeks can be summarily removed—a procedure known a expedited removal, which in the summer of 2019 Trump officials kicked into overdrive and applied to anyone caught anywhere in the United States. The one exception is for people who have fled persecution. U.S. law says anyone who is physically present in the country can tap the legal safe harbor of asylum to avoid persecution in their home country. In this case, a specialized asylum officer employed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, one of the tentacles of the Department of Homeland Security, takes a first look, and migrants who show a credible fear of persecution get scheduled for an immigration judge’s review.
Some migrants are freed, either through the luck of an enforcement officer’s grace or by convincing an immigration judge that the public won’t be imperiled and release won’t result in no-shows for court dates. Others have to stay locked up because Congress has declared that some people are too dangerous to be allowed free while the immigration court process slowly chugs forward. Edafe Okporo, a gay student activist, fled his native Nigeria after homophobic thugs robbed and beat him. In a memoir written years later, he recalled a mob breaking down his door, angrily yelling about the need to cleanse the community with his blood. “The men gripped me by my wrist and dragged me out of my house, but I could not scream. I knew no one would help me because they were all on the same side.” Fleeing to New York, he was immediately detained while his asylum case made its way through the immigration court system. “What had brought a man running for his dear life into a jail?” he asked. “I had a visa; I had never been to the States before,” he explained. The answer is as simple as it is perplexing: immigration law treats asylum-seekers as worthy of confinement. By the time an immigration judge ordered his release, he had spent “2,422,000 minutes in the womb of immigration detention,” he wrote.3
Where the power of civil law ends, the power of criminal law begins. In addition to civil confinement, migrants are locked up because the government says they committed a crime by coming to the United States. Back in 1929, Congress adopted two crimes about migration: illegal entry, which punishes those entering the United States without the federal government’s permission; and illegal reentry, which punishes those doing that after having been deported. Both were largely ignored for most of a century. But since the George W. Bush years, they have come into fashion. These days, illegal entry and illegal reentry make up the crimes that federal prosecutors pursue most often. In fiscal year 2018 alone, 105,692 people were prosecuted for a federal immigration crime.4 Defendants charged with these immigration offenses end up jailed while they wait for the courts to hear their cases more often than do defendants charged with any other federal crime. They are locked up more often than people accused of violence, and they’re imprisoned more often than people suspected of the kind of white-collar crimes that might leave them with cash to disappear with.
To federal immigration agents, people like this are viewed as posing a danger, but to Cecilia Equihua they are just ordinary people like her father, Francisco. A divorced father of two, Francisco lived in Los Angeles but frequently drove to Las Vegas, where Cecilia and her sister lived with their mother. In late 2010, Francisco made what would be his final roundtrip drive, leaving Los Angeles early in the morning and heading back late that afternoon. When he was pulled over for a busted tail light, police officers noticed a decade-old deportation on his record. “My father was arrested in 1997,” wrote his daughter Cecilia, at the time a law student and now an L.A. public defender. “He told me because of his financial struggles to support us, he made a terrible mistake—he let his garage be used as a meth lab.” For that crime, Francisco served four years in prison. Despite thirty-seven years in the United States, Francisco was stripped of his green card and deported to Mexico. With his children and his life in the United States, he came back. He was caught, convicted of illegal reentry, and sentenced to two years in a federal prison in New Mexico before being deported again. Now he sells avocados in Mexico. To Cecilia, “he is being punished for the rest of his life, since he can never live in the U.S. with his family again. And my sister and I are being punished with him.”5
Facing criminal charges, people accused of committing immigration crimes are housed in county jails, private prisons, and federal penitentiaries before they are even convicted. Eduardo José Garza, a father of three in the Rio Grande Valley, recalls the experience of being moved from jail to jail after his arrest for illegal entry. First, he was in a privately owned and operated prison in Willacy County, about an hour’s drive from his family. Then he was sent to Houston, and then Laredo, before eventually being deported to Mexico. Like Equihua, he soon recrossed the border to be with his family. When police pulled him over during a routine traffic stop, they arrested him for not having a driver’s license. The local cops who booked him into jail contacted ICE, and instead of just deporting him, ICE turned him over to federal prosecutors, who went after Garza with criminal charges for illegal reentry. He remembers the humiliation of being brought to federal court. “They treat you really badly,” he says. “They don’t talk to you how they should, as a human being. They bring you chained up as if you were a criminal.”6 But, no matter how he views himself, he is a criminal because federal officials decided to bring the full weight of the criminal justice system against him.
Today, immigration imprisonment is the norm, yet in the United States, while confinement has long been a central feature of criminal proceedings, it has been an anomaly when it comes to immigration-law enforcement. For most of the nation’s history, we did not lock up so many people for the act of migration. More often than not government agents turned a blind eye to migrants who flouted the law, either letting them into the United States or sending them back quickly and, in comparison to today, painlessly. If they committed a crime, they were expected to serve their sentence; afterward, they could return to their communities in the United States. In effect, immigration law and criminal law were separate, and citizenship played no role in whether people ended up behind bars.
Government statistics bear this out. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, few people were forcibly removed from the United States because of a conviction. During the nine decades stretching from 1892 to 1984, federal immigration officials formally barred from the United States 633,918 people. Of those, a mere 14,287 were treated that way because of criminal activity. Likewise, officials deported 812,915 people from 1908 to 1980 but only 56,669 because of a criminal offense. For the most part, government officials were more concerned that the poor would end up on welfare or that people had failed to meet visa application requirements.7 Meanwhile, federal prosecutors seldom tapped the power of criminal law to target migrants. Though entering the United States without the federal government’s permission was a crime for most of the twentieth century, prosecutors rarely tried to convict people for doing this. In 1970, prosecutors charged a mere 575 people with an immigration crime.8 Even in 1993, they filed immigration crime charges in only 2,487 cases—just 5 percent of cases pursued that year.9
Not surprisingly, few people were imprisoned because of their immigration status. Reliable prison statistics going back decades are hard to come by, but as recently as 1994 there were only 8,604 people locked up annually while they faced federal immigration crime charges. However, that number grew to 97,982 by 2013, a mammoth 1,039 percent jump.10 Imprisonment rates have similarly shifted for people actually convicted of a federal immigration crime. In 1990, there were 1,728 convicted immigration offenders locked up on an average day, but in 2013 there were 19,100.11 In 1973, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detained only 2,370 people every day, and in 1980 that number had grown to 4,062.12 But by the last months of the Obama administration, ICE held roughly 40,000 people daily, a number that would soon rise under President Trump, surpassing 42,000 daily in 2018.
During the last thirty years, both the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people for how they move across borders. As a result, the United States has the world’s largest immigrant detention system, in which upward of half a million people annually now spend time locked up because the government claims they violated immigration law. Even with record numbers of migrants locked up, less than six months into the Trump administration Congress increased funding for ICE detention and federal prosecutors charged with pursuing criminal convictions against migrants who came to the United States without the federal government’s permission.
Despite the historically unprecedented scale of immigration imprisonment, its sheer scope is often overlooked in conversations about immigration and criminal justice, and when it is mentioned, advocates, journalists, and academics tend to split confinement into two types: civil immigration detention and punitive criminal incarceration. Supposedly, civil detention doesn’t punish; criminal incarceration does. While accurate as a matter of formal law, this distinction is a farce on the ground. It fails to reflect the reality of immigration policing and the lived experience of migrants. Whatever the law says, the conduct that leads to immigration imprisonment and the conditions of confinement are largely identical across the civil/criminal divide. And no matter its formal label, immigration imprisonment often has a devastating effect on those detained, their families, and their communities.
As with its better-known policing cousin—mass incarceration as criminal punishment—the immigration imprisonment story emerges amid the racially coded debates of the mid-1980s, when legislators built the war on drugs on the threat ostensibly posed by people of color. Long before Donald Trump spilled off the pages of tabloids, politicians claimed migrants were responsible for a substantial amount of drug trafficking. From the White House to the pages of major newspapers and magazines, rumors spread of migrants dealing drug-induced death and decay across the urban landscape. More recently, inflated fears of Muslim terrorists boosted immigration imprisonment. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Muslims who were suspected of violating immigration law—and nothing more—were thrown into high-security wings of maximum-security federal prisons. Adding his own emphasis to this decades-long story, President Trump shifted the federal government’s attention to gangs. Whoever has been in office, for three decades the president, Cabinet officials, and top advisors have claimed we must imprison our way to a functional immigration-law system.
With all the hysteria about drugs, terrorism, and gangs, it’s no wonder that the vast majority of people locked inside immigration prisons are people of color. Not only does policing disproportionately focus on black and brown migrants, but immigration enforcement does too, despite the presence of plenty of Canadian and European migrants who are also violating immigration law. “Historically we have evidence of more terrorists coming across our northern Canadian border than our southern border,” Asa Hutchinson, a top DHS official under President George W. Bush, said in 2007 as the agency was furiously recruiting Spanish-speaking Border Patrol officers. How should the gargantuan department he helped lead respond to the northern threat? “The best border security on the northern border is the grandmother who has lived in her house on the border for seventy years. She sits in her home and watches the border and calls border patrol when she sees something suspicious,” Hutchinson explained.13 To the north, we rely on grandmothers in their living rooms. To the south we rely on prisons, agents, and walls.
Spurred by, or taking advantage of, racialized fears of lawlessness, those on the political right view migrants, especially noncitizens with a criminal record, as national security risks and threats to the rule of law. They are “criminals,” former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner said in 2013. On his first visit to the southern border as attorney general, Jeff Sessions instructed federal prosecutors nationwide to prioritize immigration crime cases. “Criminal aliens and the coyotes and document forgers seek to overthrow our system of lawful immigration,” he told a group of assembled Border Patrol agents in Nogales, Arizona. “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.” At the same time, many advocates keep migrants with criminal records at arm’s length out of concern that association with the most unsympathetic members of immigrant communities might tarnish broader immigration reform efforts. Sometimes, silence can weigh as heavily as the crudest words.
Despite the common refrain that immigration law is “broken,” immigration imprisonment is a sign that the United States immigration policy is working exactly as designed. The system hasn’t malfunctioned. It was intended to punish, stigmatize, and marginalize—all for political and financial gain. Politicians get elected, local governments receive revenue, corporations profit, and white racists find comfort against the prevailing winds of change that bring different languages, different people, and new challenges to old communities. That is exactly what is happening.
Prisons mark the people locked up as outcasts. The coiled razor wire stretched in layers around the perimeter suggests that they are dangerous, and if they are dangerous then good riddance. Prison segregates migrants physically and in the public’s imagination. They can be ignored, forgotten, or remembered only as the unknown threat that requires guards, cameras, and steel doors. At the same time, their unseen existence is used as proof that the threat is real. Erased of individuality, they become justification for strong-armed policing tactics and are flagged as evidence that elected officials care about the innocent public.
Immigration prisons are also surrounded in secrecy. Whatever happens on the inside stays on the inside—or at least that is what the authorities intend. Confined in Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center for 444 days, poet Alexandra La Golosa wrote, “In Eloy we have dates instead of names. / Nobody asks while meeting of your name— / They ask ‘how much’ and ‘when.’” Their treatment, she added, was akin to “animals in chain.”14 Some migrants talk about their time inside the “perrera”—the dog pound—because they were locked inside large chain-link-fence enclosures within Border Patrol stations. “When we arrived at la perrera,” one woman said, “[my son] was taken away from me again.”15 Pediatricians and psychologists say children should never be imprisoned, but federal officials say they have only two options: take kids from their parents and lock them up with other kids, or imprison families together. In today’s topsy-turvy world, family detention is offered as the humanitarian response to family separation.
Meanwhile, the safety of imprisoned migrants is hardly guaranteed. Sexual assaults are not uncommon. Consider Levian Pacheco, a “youth care worker” in a Phoenix immigration prison. He worked for Southwest Key, the nonprofit that operates the largest number of facilities for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency responsible for holding young people who are no longer with their parents. After sexually abusing seven boys, Pacheco was caught, convicted, and sentenced to nineteen years in prison. Now he’s incarcerated, and the boys he abused are forced to live with their trauma.
Life is by no means sacred inside immigration prisons. Kamyar Samimi was a young man when he arrived in the United States in 1976. Three years later, he became a permanent resident. Almost thirty years after that, in 2005, he was convicted of simple possession of cocaine. The judge ordered him to do some community service, but Samimi didn’t get any jail time. His troubles might have ended there. He went back to his ordinary life in suburban Denver. But twelve years after his conviction, ICE agents arrived at his home. They arrested him and took him down to a nearby privately owned and operated detention center in Aurora, the city infamous for the 2012 shooting where James Holmes opened fire inside a movie theater and took twelve lives. Aurora would also be where Samimi’s life ended. He died in ICE’s custody. He “fell ill” and died of cardiac arrest, ICE said.16 Some, including a local congressman, remained unconvinced; they wanted to know whether lousy medical care was to blame.17 An internal review released a year later revealed that, despite his complaints of feeling ill, nurses checked his vital signs half as often as a doctor demanded and gave him less than half the medicine ordered.18
Samimi’s death reminds us that “prisoners are persons most of us would rather not think about,” as Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1987 case. “Banished from everyday sight, they exist in a shadow world that only dimly enters our awareness.”19
Financial incentives push toward ever-growing incarceration. In immigration enforcement, private prisons have an outsized presence. Sixty-five percent of ICE detainees are held in private facilities.20 Every year, private prison corporations make hundreds of millions of dollars off immigration imprisonment. “You sell [prisons] just like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers,” private prison pioneer Tom Beasley said.21 To entice customers with cheap prices, inside some prisons migrants are put to work for $1 per day. Whether it’s voluntary, as prison officials claim, or forced labor, as many migrants say, it’s certainly profitable to pay cooks and cleaners well below the minimum wage.
Like farmers and consumers hungry for cheap food, this is a story of symbiosis. But the relationship private prisons have with the federal government isn’t one of an opportunistic industry meeting the needs of a willing customer. The private prison industry grew up alongside immigration imprisonment. Their modern histories began to expand jointly under the Reagan administration when entrepreneurial prison executives and investors convinced ICE’s predecessor, the INS, that it could quickly take custody of an ever-changing number of migrants. Since then, that has remained the private prison industry’s tune, and the federal government has become dependent on its supply of guards and steel doors.
Just like money matters, votes do too. In some places, immigration prisons are an economic lifeline. Across the United States, local governments have gotten into the business of immigration imprisonment by building new jails or enlarging existing facilities in the hope that the federal government will pay the bills. Migrants are turned into commodities—their bodies valued for the revenue stream they promise. Facing the possibility of an immigration prison shutdown, the mayor of a small South Texas town heavily dependent on prison jobs didn’t mince words: “If we lose our prisoners, the income comes down.… We need everybody to be employed. We need those prisoners.” Roughly 6 percent of counties nationwide contract with ICE to hold migrants.22 Others use space in their county jails to house the U.S. Marshals Service’s immigration prisoners. Whichever agency sends the prisoners, the counties take the federal government’s money all the same. With that, they hire guards and pay for construction—more jobs for local workers, more votes for local politicians.
Instead of continuing along this path, the United States must rethink its approach to migrants. Toddlers like Diego can’t be blamed for coming here in violation of federal law. No one asked for his opinion. But it’s equally true that others do have a choice. After he was deported, Francisco Equihua decided he would flout federal laws yet again so that he could be with his daughters. “My job is to be here for you guys,” he told his daughter Cecilia. It’s a noble goal, but it doesn’t erase his crime. His transgression is clear, but to his kids he’s still just dad.
Migrants are just people. They are fallible, imperfect human beings. Their passports might differ from U.S. citizens’, but the skeletons in their closets don’t. Immigration law needs to accept that migrants are no better and no worse than U.S. citizens. The wife of Edgar Baltazar García, a long-time Texas resident and veteran thrown into an immigration prison pulled the veil off her family’s two-handed treatment: “He’s brave enough to come and serve this country, and for him to be detained, it’s not right. There are a lot of other people out here who are U.S. citizens and they don’t even have the bravery he does to serve our country,” Jennifer García told reporters while sitting in my family’s law firm.23 She might have added that imprisoning people because they violate immigration law raises the dust of the racially charged era in which the immigration prison legal infrastructure was built.
This book takes a hard look at the U.S. immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. The use of confinement to target migrants was dreamed up at very specific historical moments, and that history matters. It tells the story of fears of decades past refracted through the prism of the United States’ troubled race and class relations. It helps explain why we now do what we do, and it hints at how to unravel the vast immigration prison regime. So how did we go from effectively abolishing immigration imprisonment during the 1950s and 1960s to today’s pattern of locking up half a million people annually? To understand that dramatic shift, we have to step back to the late 1800s, when the federal government became heavily involved in immigration law for the first time.