From Seattle to Miami, the United States locks up migrants like no other country. In my second book, Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants ($24.99, The New Press), I describe the sordid reality of immigration imprisonment today. We are only two weeks away from the book’s official release date on December 3, but already it is making its way into readers’ hands. Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, says Migrating to Prison is“essential for anyone trying to understand how the United States came to have the world’s largest [...]
Closing the Ellis Island immigration prison
To mark the country’s first Veterans Day in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, Jr., visited New York’s Ebbets Field, home of the famous Brooklyn Dodgers, to preside over a naturalization ceremony. While he prodded the crowd to engage in the privileges of citizenship, he also announced a dramatic policy shift. The Department of Justice, he explained, would shut down its major immigration prisons along both coasts. At the time, immigration law enforcement responsibilities fell to the Justice Department. In essence, Brownell announced that the United [...]
Border realities
In the pitched battles over immigration, rhetorical binaries dominate. Republicans refer to migrants as aliens. Democrats trumpet innocent children traumatized by extremist Trump-era practices. Migrants are either good or they’re bad, and in the imaginations of politicians and pundits, it’s possible to put some people into one category and other people into the other. Where talking points end, laws and policies begin. Under the illusion that people can easily be boxed, immigration law assigns privileges and sets law enforcement priorities based on markers of undesirability. Born in [...]
Expedited suffering
When it comes to President Trump’s attacks on migrants, his administration’s latest policies prove that there are no limits. What started with a Trump Tower claim in June 2015 that Mexican rapists were streaming across the border has morphed into a wholesale attack on people fleeing for their lives. At every step, the administration has turned to imprisonment as its favored means of punishing migrants who are already here and convincing others to stay away. Immigration and Customs Enforcement already holds more people in its facilities than ever before. Its cousin agency within the U.S. [...]
Trump/McConnell bill would boost ICE detention reach
The bill that President Trump touted as a shutdown-ending compromise is doomed to stall in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, but its boost to ICE’s detention powers is worth considering because it maintains a recent trend. Tucked into page 417, the bill dedicates $4,989,158,000—that is, just shy of $5 billion—to ICE’s enforcement, detention, and removal operations. This is a slight bump from the $4.1 billion that the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division received through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 . ERO is one of ICE’s four units, though it [...]
ICE enforcement picks up in FY 18, but remains below record highs
In the federal government’s first fiscal year entirely under President Trump, ICE detained more people than a year earlier, but still lags behind Obama-era highs. Fiscal year 2018, which ran from October 1, 2017 to September 31, 2018, saw 396,448 people detained by ICE and 256,085 removed from the United States, ICE reported. ICE’s detention capacity has grown in recent years. Under President Obama, Congress regularly increased the agency’s budget for confinement operations. The agency uses over 600 facilities spread throughout the United States, many of which are nothing more than county [...]
Oregon lawsuit challenges state, local participation in immigration enforcement
By Christopher N. Lasch and Mark Fleming On Thursday, a state trial court judge in Wasco County, Oregon (of Wild, Wild Country renown) will hear summary judgment arguments in Stovall, et. al. v. Northern Oregon Corrections dba NORCOR, No. 17-CV-31082 (Or. Cir. Ct.). At the heart of the lawsuit is a contract known as an “Intergovernmental Services Agreement” (IGSA) between NORCOR, a four-county public prison system, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Under the IGSA, NORCOR jails people for ICE who are in civil immigration proceedings. The question for the trial court [...]
Bulk of immigration prisoners commit basic offenses
Immigration crime is neither unusual nor new. Federal law threatens imprisonment for a host of migration activity. Impersonating a United States citizen can lead to three years behind bars. Smuggling people into the country is too, and if anyone dies in the process it can even result in execution. Far less newsworthy, entering the country without the correct permission is also criminalized. Since 1929, federal law has prohibited entering the United States without the government’s authorization. Doing that once can result in six months imprisonment. Entering the United States without [...]
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