Migrating to Prison
My second book takes a hard look at immigration prisons. Where once the United States rarely imprisoned people for violating immigration law, today we lock up 400,000 every year–from babies to the elderly. In Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (The New Press), I explain how the United States got here and why we should abolish immigration prisons.
Available from your local independent bookstore or Amazon. Look for my talks, all of which are currently virtual.
Praise
“García Hernández reveals the haphazard ways immigration enforcement has been devised and administered, how supremacist notions of nationalism and race have long guided our policymaking, and how adherence to procedural guidelines was gradually reframed as a question of criminality.” – New York Review of Books
“A must read whether or not you are familiar with the history of immigration law in the US.” – Erica Scott-Pacheco
Migrating to Prison “skillfully and gracefully takes the reader on a rich, decades-long journey of xenophobia and racism, profiteering, and oppression, against a backdrop of an era not so long ago in which the United States demonstrated the country did not have to rely on incarcerating people for their migration-related activity. It simply chooses to do so.” – Cornell Law Review
“Timely, informative, expertly written, organized and presented, Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants is unreservedly recommended….” – Midwest Book Review
“Migrating to Prison provides an eye-opening look at the origins of the system and how it operates.” – Shelf Awareness
Migrating to Prison “provides us with ways to effectively fight the policies that incarcerate immigrants for no other reason than they are immigrants, by cutting them off from the root.” – Jade Anna Hughes
“[García] Hernández lays out in a lucid, linear fashion the evolution of immigration law and its enforcement in the United States.” – The Intercept
Migrating to Prison “es un llamado urgente para el cierre de estos centros de detención.” – Excélsior
García Hernández “argues compellingly that immigrant advocates shouldn’t content themselves with debates about how many thousands of immigrants to lock up, or other minor tweaks. ‘Instead, we should dream,’ he writes.” – Texas Observer
“A chilling, timely overview of the American tendency to first exploit and then criminalize migrants….García Hernández counters pessimism with in-depth research and measured, passionate argument. An effective jeremiad on a key moral controversy of the Trump era.” – Kirkus
“Well-written, easy to follow, and lays out in stark terms why it is a moral imperative to rethink the very idea of immigration prisons.” – Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
“While it shirks simplification of a very complex topic…[García Hernández’s] new book is the first study that makes this issue and its human impacts accessible to a lay audience.” – S. Deborah Kang
“García Hernández has spent more than a decade working inside America’s immigration prison system — a system that has grown so large, it is hard to imagine immigration enforcement without it. In Migrating to Prison, García Hernández dispels that myth, arguing that the U.S. can and should dismantle its immigration prisons.” – High Country News
“What will replace the prison?…A thought-provoking perspective on immigration and U.S. immigration policy.” – Library Journal (starred review)
“Exuding humanity, insight, and forbearance, García Hernández offers a concise and powerful look at a complex and perplexing challenge.” – Booklist
“an accessible history and fierce critique of the U.S. immigration system….His thoughtful mixture of reportage and legal scholarship makes for an important entry in the immigration debate.” – Publishers Weekly
Crimmigration Law
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
Book Description
In the last thirty years, criminal law and immigration law have become so deeply intertwined that for migrants the distinction between these areas of law is frequently irrelevant. What matters is that immigration law often turns on the outcome of criminal proceedings, that criminal proceedings are routinely affected by a defendant’s immigration status, and that policing habits long associated with one or the other area of law have crossed the doctrinal divide. This is crimmigration law.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández has gathered the insight accumulated from six years of chronicling these developments on crImmigration.com and in scholarly articles into Crimmigration Law, the first book to map the doctrinal landscape of this emerging body of law that is rapidly evolving in courtrooms and legislatures throughout the United States.
A second edition is expected in 2021.
Praise
“García Hernández is to be congratulated on his attempt to further the field of crimmigration law. His book is an important contribution to the debate on the rise of formal social control of immigration by means of harsh enforcement measures.” – Eduardo Saad-Diniz, Professor, Ribeirão Preto Law School and Program for Latin American Integration, University of São Paulo [read the full review here]
César “is a luminary among scholars working in the area” of crimmigration law and this book “represents a tool for lawyers to become better lawyers for their clients, and to achieve better outcomes for the most socially outcast members of society—criminals and immigrants.” – SpearIt, Associate Professor of Law at Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law [read the full review here]
“Crimmigration Law is a must-read for law students and practitioners seeking an introduction to the complex legal doctrine and practice challenges at the merger of immigration and criminal law.” – Ingrid V. Eagly, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Faculty Director, David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest and Policy [read the full review here]
“Put it right next to your Kurzban’s.” – Matthew L. Kolken, immigration attorney at Kolken & Kolken and frequent news commentator [read the full review here]