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Governments increasingly rely upon detention to control the movement of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. The deprivation of liberty of non-citizens due to their undocumented or irregular status is often fraught with gross injustices. This book stresses the need for global policy-makers to address these practices in order to ensure compliance with fundamental human rights and prevent detention abuses. Approaching detention from an interdisciplinary perspective, this volume brings together leading writers and thinkers to provide a greater understanding of why it is such an important social phenomenon and suggest ways to confront it locally and globally. Challenging Immigration Detention thematically examines a broad range of situations across the globe, with contributors providing overviews of key issues, case studies and experiences in their fields, while highlighting potential strategies for curbing detention abuses. Demonstrating the value of varied analytical frameworks and investigative angles, the contributors provide urgently needed insight into a growing human rights issue. With cross-disciplinary investigation into an issue with immediate global importance, Challenging Immigration Detention is vital for undergraduates, postgraduates, activists, lawyers and policy-makers interested in international human rights. National and international humanitarian organizations and advocacy groups working in migrant and asylum rights will find this a compelling and diverse overview of migrant detention.

Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades. InAmerican Gulag,prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions. Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be read by all Americans. It is a book that will change the way we see our country.American Gulagtakes us inside prisons such as the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the Corrections Corporation of America's Houston Processing Center, and county jails around the country that profit from contracts to hold INS prisoners. It contains disturbing in-depth profiles of detainees, including Emmy Kutesa, a defector from the Ugandan army who was tortured and then escaped to the United States, where he was imprisoned in Queens, and then undertook a hunger strike in protest. To provide a framework for understanding stories like these, Dow gives a brief history of immigration laws and practices in the United States-including the repercussions of September 11 and present-day policies. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority.American Gulagexposes the full story of a cruel prison system that is operating today with an astonishing lack of accountability.

Nick Harris has been drifting for years -- until the day he finds himself amid red dirt and razor wire, a refugee-prison guard in a detention centre. Nick is no crusader and no bleeding-heart. He's just a man in debt who needs a job. Time passes slowly behind the wire, no matter who you are. To distract themselves, the asylum seekers tell Nick about their lives and cultures, and the families they have left behind. They steal from him with good humour, and swear at him with bad. Nick breaks all the rules: slacking off when he guards the cordial machine, swimming with crocodiles, brawling with locals, romancing workmates. And then there is the cardinal sin -- becoming friends with the detainees. The novel is a realistic window into the hidden world of immigration detention centres, drawn from the experience of a former guard. It is one man's vision, looking through the wire at the people locked inside our desert prisons, and looking out at the people who put them there.

This book draws together the work of a new community of scholars with a growing interest in carceral geography: the geographical study of practices of imprisonment and detention. It combines work by geographers on 'mainstream' penal establishments where people are incarcerated by the prevailing legal system, with geographers' recent work on migrant detention centres, where irregular migrants and 'refused' asylum seekers are detained, ostensibly pending decisions on admittance or repatriation. Working in these contexts, the book's contributors investigate the geographical location and spatialities of institutions, the nature of spaces of incarceration and detention and experiences inside them, governmentality and prisoner agency, cultural geographies of penal spaces, and mobility in the carceral context. In dialogue with emergent and topical agendas in geography around mobility, space and agency, and in relation to international policy challenges such as the (dis)functionality of imprisonment and the search for alternatives to detention, this book presents a timely addition to emergent interdisciplinary scholarship that will prompt dialogue among those working in geography, criminology and prison sociology.

On any given day nearly 3000 foreign national citizens are detained under immigration powers in UK detention centers alone. Around the world immigrants are routinely detained in similar conditions. The institutions charged with immigrant detention are volatile and contested sites. They are also places about which we know very little. What is their goal? How do they operate? How are they justified? Inside Immigration Detention lifts the lid on the hidden world of migrant detention, presenting the first national study of life in British immigration removal centers. Offering more than just a description of life behind bars of those men and women awaiting deportation, it uses staff and detainee testimonies to revisit key assumptions about state power and the legacies of colonialism under conditions of globalization. Based on fieldwork conducted in six immigration removal centers (IRCs) between 2009 and 2012, it draws together a large amount of empirical data including: detainee surveys and interviews, staff interviews, observation, and detailed field notes. From this, the book explores how immigration removal centers identify their inhabitants as strangers, constructing them as unfamiliar, ambiguous and uncertain. In this endeavor, the establishments are greatly assisted by their resemblance to prisons and by familiar racialized narratives about foreigners and nationality. However, as staff and detainee testimonies reveal, in their interactions and day-to-day life women and men find many points of commonality. Such recognition of one another reveals the goal and effect of detention to be incomplete. Denial requires effort. In order to minimize the effort it must expend, the state 'governs at distance', via the contract. It also splits itself in two, deploying some immigration staff onsite, while keeping the actual decision-makers (the caseworkers) elsewhere, sequestered from the potentially destabilizing effects of facing up to those whom they wish to remove. Such distancing, while bureaucratically effective, contributes to the uncertainty of daily life in detention, and is often the source of considerable criticism and unease. Denial and familiarity are embodied and localized activities, whose pains and contradictions inhere in concrete relationships.

\"An in-depth look at the imprisonment of immigrants addressing the intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system\"-- Provided by publisher.

Questions over immigration and asylum face almost all Western countries. Should only economically useful immigrants be allowed? What should be done with unwanted or 'illegal' immigrants? In this bold intervention, Alexandra Hall shows that immigration detention centres offer a window onto society's broader attitudes towards immigrants. Despite periodic media scandals, remarkably little has been written about the everyday workings of this system, or about the people responsible for setting immigration policy. Detention, particularly, is a hidden side of border politics, despite its growing international importance as a tool of control and security. This book also looks at the social life and the relationships between officers and immigrants to explore broad social trends, as well as resistance within the system, and provides rare insights into the treatment of the 'other'.

\"The experience of border crossing for refugees and irregular migrants challenges global border and migration controls in multiple contexts. Using qualitative field research in Tanzania, Spain, Morocco and Australia, Heather Johnson asks how a global regime of migration management and control can be perceived through the dynamics of particular border spaces: refugee camps, border zones and detention centres. She explores how irregular migrants are impacted by the increasingly security-oriented practices of border control, and how they confront these practices. Johnson rejects the characterization of border spaces as exceptional, abject and exclusionary, arguing instead for an understanding of politics as everyday contestation that reveals a radical political agency, re-imagining the global non-citizen as a transgressive and powerful figure. Building on recent scholarship that rethinks irregularity and non-citizenship, her conclusions have broad implications for how we understand irregular migration from a position of dialogue and solidarity\"-- Provided by publisher.

Over 350,000 individuals were placed into civil immigration detention in 2016. Held in prison-like detention centers or local jails, detainees wear \"orange suits, . . . are shackled during visitation and court visits, . . . are subject to surveillance and strip searches, [and] are referred to by number, not by name.\" Unlike individuals awaiting criminal trial in jail, seventy-one percent of immigration detainees are required by statute to be detained without any access to a bond hearing. Last Term, in 'Jennings v. Rodriguez', the Supreme Court held that the Ninth Circuit had incorrectly used the canon of constitutional avoidance to read a six-month limit into sections of the 'Immigration and Nationality Act' (INA) that allowed for detention without the possibility of bond. The Court broke from its previous practice of broadly applying the canon to the INA, choosing instead to read the statute in a strictly textualist manner. By rejecting an interpretation of the statute that would allow for regular bond hearings, the Court pushes lower courts to either reject these cases on procedural grounds or grapple with the question of constitutionality directly, thus forcing a choice between the rights of detainees and the plenary power of the political branches. Unless the courts uphold detainees' due process rights, detained immigrants will continue to endure months, or even years, of punishment while they fight to stay in the United States.