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 [...]
Op-ed in New York Times & book excerpt
On the week that Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants is officially released, get a preview of the major arguments I raise in an op-ed published in The New York Times. The piece appears online today and in the print edition on December 3. If you're interested in more, you can read an excerpt from the book in Borderless Magazine. Let's not stop there. I would love to talk about the birth, growth, and potential end of immigration prisons in person. Later this week, I'll be speaking about the book in Denver, then I head to Seattle next week. More stops are on [...]
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 [...]