Detained And Deported

An intimate look at the people ensnared by the US detention and deportation system, the largest in the world On a bright Phoenix morning, Elena Santiago opened her door to find her house surrounded by a platoon of federal immigration agents. Her children screamed as the officers handcuffed her and drove her away. Within hours, she was deported to the rough border town of Nogales, Sonora, with nothing but the clothes on her back. Her two-year-old daughter and fifteen-year-old son, both American citizens, were taken by the state of Arizona and consigned to foster care. Their mother’s only offense: living undocumented in the United States. Immigrants like Elena, who’ve lived in the United States for years, are being detained and deported at unprecedented rates. Thousands languish in detention centers—often torn from their families—for months or even years. Deportees are returned to violent Central American nations or unceremoniously dropped off in dangerous Mexican border towns. Despite the dangers of the desert crossing, many immigrants will slip across the border again, stopping at nothing to get home to their children. Drawing on years of reporting in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, journalist Margaret Regan tells their poignant stories. Inside the massive Eloy Detention Center, a for-profit private prison in Arizona, she meets detainee Yolanda Fontes, a mother separated from her three small children. In a Nogales soup kitchen, deportee Gustavo Sanchez, a young father who’d lived in Phoenix since the age of eight, agonizes about the risks of the journey back. Regan demonstrates how increasingly draconian detention and deportation policies have broadened police powers, while enriching a private prison industry whose profits are derived from human suffering. She also documents the rise of resistance, profiling activists and young immigrant “Dreamers” who are fighting for the rights of the undocumented. Compelling and heart-wrenching, Detained and Deported offers a rare glimpse into the lives of people ensnared in America’s immigration dragnet.

Detention and deportation have become keystones of immigration and border enforcement policies around the world. The United States has built a massive immigration enforcement system that detains and deports more people than any other country. This system is grounded in the assumptions that national borders are territorially fixed and controllable, and that detention and deportation bolster security and deter migration. Nancy Hiemstra's multisited ethnographic research pairs investigation of enforcement practices in the United States with an exploration into conditions migrants face in one country of origin: Ecuador. Detain and Deport's transnational approach reveals how the U.S. immigration enforcement system's chaotic organization and operation distracts from the mismatch between these assumptions and actual outcomes. Hiemstra draws on the experiences of detained and deported migrants, as well as their families and communities in Ecuador, to show convincingly that instead of deterring migrants and improving national security, detention and deportation generate insecurities and forge lasting connections across territorial borders. At the same time, the system's chaos works to curtail rights and maintain detained migrants on a narrow path to deportation. Hiemstra argues that in addition to the racialized ideas of national identity and a fluctuating dependence on immigrant labor that have long propelled U.S. immigration policies, the contemporary emphasis on detention and deportation is fueled by the influence of people and entities that profit from them.

Examines the history of American immigration, particularly those lesser-known stories of immigrants who were denied entrance into the United States or detained for security reasons, including the story of a ship of Jewish refugees.

Detention and deportation have become keystones of immigration and border enforcement policies around the world. The United States has built a massive immigration enforcement system that detains and deports more people than any other country. This system is grounded in the assumptions that national borders are territorially fixed and controllable, and that detention and deportation bolster security and deter migration. Nancy Hiemstra’s multisited ethnographic research pairs investigation of enforcement practices in the United States with an exploration into conditions migrants face in one country of origin: Ecuador. Detain and Deport’s transnational approach reveals how the U.S. immigration enforcement system’s chaotic organization and operation distracts from the mismatch between these assumptions and actual outcomes. Hiemstra draws on the experiences of detained and deported migrants, as well as their families and communities in Ecuador, to show convincingly that instead of deterring migrants and improving national security, detention and deportation generate insecurities and forge lasting connections across territorial borders. At the same time, the system’s chaos works to curtail rights and maintain detained migrants on a narrow path to deportation. Hiemstra argues that in addition to the racialized ideas of national identity and a fluctuating dependence on immigrant labor that have long propelled U.S. immigration policies, the contemporary emphasis on detention and deportation is fueled by the influence of people and entities that profit from them.

Contents.

In recent years states across the world have boosted their legal and institutional capacity to deport noncitizens residing on their territory, including failed asylum seekers, “illegal” migrants, and convicted criminals. Scholars have analyzed this development primarily through the lens of immigration control. Deportation has been viewed as one amongst a range of measures designed to control entrance, distinguished primarily by the fact that it is exercised inside the territory of the state. But deportation also has broader social and political effects. It provides a powerful way through which the state reminds noncitizens that their presence in the polity is contingent upon acceptable behavior. Furthermore, in liberal democratic states immunity from deportation is one of the key privileges that citizens enjoy that distinguishes them from permanent residents. This book examines the historical, institutional and social dimensions of the relationship between deportation and citizenship in liberal democracies. Contributions also include analysis of the formal and informal functions of administrative immigration detention, and the role of the European Parliament in the area of irregular immigration and borders. The book also develops an analytical framework that identifies and critically appraises grassroots and sub national responses to migration policy in liberal democratic societies, and considers how groups form after deportation and the employment of citizenship in this particular context, making it of interest to scholars and international policy makers alike. “It is commonly surmised that the increased flows of goods, ideas, finance and people are slowly leading to the dissolution of boundaries between nation-states. However, as the varied and excellent chapters in this collection demonstrate, the enforcement of state power through detention and deportation is still a real and growing feature of contemporary political life. Expulsion has always been a moral sanction (think of Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden of Eden or the ostracism directed against dissidents in ancient Athens, who were forced to leave for ten years). As the editors suggest, deportation remains a means of enforcing a normative order (‘a community of values’), while the authors and editors of this book have expanded the subject-matter to include the deportees’ perspectives and the effects of deportation on families, other potential victims and on those whose social inclusion has been affirmed by the exclusion of others. These studies will enrich and enlarge the study of the more naked forms of state power.” - Robin Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Development Studies, University of Oxford “This wide-ranging, well-researched, and highly informative work is a major contribution to the growing body of scholarship examining the harsh consequences of deportation around the world. The editors have gathered an impressive group of scholars who craft an eclectic view of how deportation has evolved, what it may signify, and how it now works in various settings. With its inclusion of historical, institutional, comparative, and finely-textured, sensitive experiential studies, this book offers an important--if frequently distressing--overview of phenomena that deserve our full attention.” - Daniel Kanstroom, Professor of Law and Director, International Human Rights Program, Boston College Law School

This important collection examines deportation as an increasingly global mechanism of state control. Anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, and sociologists consider not only the physical expulsion of noncitizens but also the social discipline and labor subordination resulting from deportability, the threat of forced removal. They explore practices and experiences of deportation in regional and national settings from the U.S.-Mexico border to Israel, and from Somalia to Switzerland. They also address broader questions, including the ontological significance of freedom of movement; the historical antecedents of deportation, such as banishment and exile; and the development, entrenchment, and consequences of organizing sovereign power and framing individual rights by territory. Whether investigating the power that individual and corporate sponsors have over the fate of foreign laborers in Bahrain, the implications of Germany’s temporary suspension of deportation orders for pregnant and ill migrants, or the significance of the detention camp, the contributors reveal how deportation reflects and reproduces notions about public health, racial purity, and class privilege. They also provide insight into how deportation and deportability are experienced by individuals, including Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims in the United States. One contributor looks at asylum claims in light of an unusual anti-deportation campaign mounted by Algerian refugees in Montreal; others analyze the European Union as an entity specifically dedicated to governing mobility inside and across its official borders. The Deportation Regime addresses urgent issues related to human rights, international migration, and the extensive security measures implemented by nation-states since September 11, 2001. Contributors: Rutvica Andrijasevic, Aashti Bhartia, Heide Castañeda , Galina Cornelisse , Susan Bibler Coutin, Nicholas De Genova, Andrew M. Gardner, Josiah Heyman, Serhat Karakayali, Sunaina Marr Maira, Guillermina Gina Nuñez, Peter Nyers, Nathalie Peutz, Enrica Rigo, Victor Talavera, William Walters, Hans-Rudolf Wicker, Sarah S. Willen