In the weeks since my book, Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, was published, it has received widespread exposure—from opinion pieces in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times to an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and NPR’s Here & Now. To mark the book’s release, students, colleagues, and friends from the University of Denver College of Law are joining me today for a reading and signing. Watch the conversation live on crimmigration.com starting at 12:00 p.m. MST. [...]
The Great Writ’s Elusive Promise
By Mary Holper In two recent cases, Reid v. Donelan and Brito v. Barr, a federal court in Massachusetts limited ICE’s power to detain people. But by requiring detained immigrants to file habeas corpus petitions to get a bond hearing in immigration court, Chief Judge Saris of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts undercut the strength of her own clear-sighted analysis. Reid and Brito are both class actions challenging immigration detention. For Reid class members, they must file a habeas corpus petition arguing that their detention under a 1996 mandatory detention statute, [...]
On Morning Joe
My book, Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, has been out for about a month and the message that the United States hasn't always locked up so many migrants is receiving exciting attention. I was recently on "Morning Joe," MSNBC's morning news show, to talk about the bipartisan tradition of supporting immigration prisons. If you missed it, watch my conversation with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and their colleagues now. The book has also received a lot of insightful coverage from other journalists. At the Texas Observer, Gus Bova says the book "makes [...]
Book Tour: Migrating to Prison
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 [...]
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