By Carrie Dawson In December 2013, Lucia Vega Jimenez, an undocumented Mexican national who worked as a chambermaid in Vancouver, was caught paying less than the full fare for a train ticket. The transit police turned her over to Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), the government body responsible for border security, who took her into custody. The day before she was scheduled to be deported, Jimenez hanged herself from a shower rod in the immigration detention center. She died one week later. In a newspaper interview, Yasmin Trejo, a friend of Jimenez’s, said, “Lucia ended up being [...]
Private prisons: boom or bust?
What does the future hold for the private prison industry? There is no doubt that this a pivotal moment for this critical enterprise in the nation’s policing regime. The Justice Department’s August 2016 announcement that it will reduce its reliance on private prison operators has spurred a bevy of discussions about the utility and morality of profiting off human bondage. None is more prominent than Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson’s statement that DHS has launched an internal review of its private prison operations to see whether it ought to follow the Justice Department’s lead. Make [...]
Bipartisan Immigration Imprisonment
Top Obama administration officials have made much of their concern about the country’s outsized prison population. In 2015, President Obama famously visited a federal penitentiary, the first sitting president to ever do so. In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder championed sentencing reforms targeting low-level drug offenders. And Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates recently announced that the Justice Department would substantially reduce its reliance on private prison operators. But at the same time, the Obama administration has arrested and imprisoned a historically unprecedented [...]
Is the border truly a shoot-at-will location?
The Fourth Amendment offers a powerful bulwark against the state’s power to deprive people of their liberty. Only with the intercession of a neutral arbiter, the text indicates, can the government exercise its immense coercive powers. Anyone who has followed the evolution of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence over the last three decades knows that this promise is far from the reality. Along the border, however, even the watered-down state in which the Fourth Amendment hobbles along might be too much. Is it possible that a Border Patrol officer might have wielded his weapon too loosely, but the [...]
Retelling migration in the era of global capitalism
The pattern is astonishingly clear. Every year, the U.S. Marshals Service books into its custody almost 100,000 people suspected of entering the United States without the federal government’s permission. Every year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency confines over 400,000 people waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Every year, private prison corporations and local governments reap hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for locking up people suspected to have violated some tenant of migration control. Every year, thousands of people die [...]
Pretrial immigration prisoner trends, part 2
Last week I wrote about the enormous number of migrants who face confinement while they are prosecuted for federal immigration crimes. The absolute numbers are astonishing. Almost 100,000 people suspected of engaging in nothing worse than an immigration crime were held in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in fiscal year 2013 alone. Today I remain focused on the federal government’s pretrial immigration prison population, but I take a slight different approach. To provide some context with which to understand the number of pretrial immigration crime defendants who are confined, today [...]
Detention myopia
In Canada and the United Kingdom, migrants are sometimes confined in prison-like settings. In Malta, they’re held in converted military barracks. Like so many others, these countries have come to rely on imprisonment to enforce their immigration laws. Indeed, I recently reviewed a book that provides an excellent overview of immigration imprisonment tactics in fifteen countries. This blog’s readers know full well how pervasive this phenomenon is in the United States. With over 400,000 people confined every year by ICE, we count the world’s largest immigration prison population (without even [...]
Border Patrol agent gets immunity after killing fleeing suspect
A Border Patrol agent who shot to death a fleeing suspect won’t face legal liability, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit announced last week. Mendez v. Poitevent, No. 15-50790, slip op. (5th Cir. May 19, 2016). Despite being clouded in controversy, the Fifth Circuit’s decision is crystal clear that the claims lodged by eighteen-year-old Juan Mendez’s family members won’t expose Border Patrol agent Taylor Poitevent to any legal repercussions. As recounted in detail by the Fifth Circuit, here is what happened. On October 5, 2010, Border Patrol Agent Taylor Poitevent, uniformed [...]