‘Catch and Remove’: Detention, Deterrence, and Discipline in US Noncitizen Family Detention Practice

Abstract

Critical security scholars have argued that biometric identity technologies, databanking, digital surveillance, and risk analysis reveal not a blockaded boundary but a border that follows transboundary migrants as they move within and between national territories. Managed through risk-based technologies, this networked, contingent border respatialises inclusion and exclusion, forming a border that is potentially everywhere and nowhere in particular. At the same time, immigration scholars have shown how immigration authorities deploy policing, inspection, and identification practices both within and beyond territorial boundaries, making life increasingly uncertain for noncitizens. In the US, Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) authority to detain noncitizens has become a key spatial strategy in domestic counter-terrorism, interior immigration enforcement and border securitisation. Thus, transboundary migration and state responses to it trouble analytic distinctions between domestic and foreign policy, immigration and national security, the border and the interior. This paper builds on recent work in immigration geopolitics to analyse how detention, in particular, works to contain individual migrants and deter future migrants. Focusing on noncitizen family detention, this article situates US noncitizen detention in a broader milieu of pre-9/11 US immigration enforcement law and post-9/11 security practices. I then analyse how detention congeals a number of spatial strategies -remoteness, isolation, spatial ordering, inter-centre transfers, and criminalisation -that work to destabilise migrants' support networks. Modulated with digitised border and identity 313 surveillance technologies, detention foregrounds the persistence of disciplinary tactics in risk-dominated security regimes.

Pre-Migration Trauma Exposure and Mental Health Functioning among Central American Migrants Arriving at the US Border

“…While awaiting disposition, families can be placed in a detention facility or can be released to a family member or a sponsor living in the community. [7]…”

Hotspots and the geographies of humanitarianism

“…There is considerable work in a variety of disciplines examining the growth of the management of migrant mobilities focused on processes of detention and incarceration (Bosworth, 2014;Martin, 2012;Mountz, 2011). Alongside this there has been an emerging body of literature that has tracked the logics of care and control in the policing of mobility (Albahari, 2015;Fassin, 2012;Pallister-Wilkins, 2015a;Sheller, 2012;Ticktin, 2005;Williams, 2015).…”

Pressured into a Preference to Leave? A Study on the “Specific” Deterrent Effects and Perceived Legitimacy of Immigration Detention

“…Two main types exist: (1) preadmission detention at the border, involving foreigners not admitted to the state's territory, and (2) pre‐expulsion detention of foreigners whose stay in the territory is, has, or is likely to become unauthorized. Although formally not a punishment, governments do use immigration detention to deter unwanted immigrants from the territory (Campesi , DeBono ; Hasselberg ; Kalhan ; Leerkes and Broeders ; Mainwaring ; Martin ; Pickering and Weber ). That claim rests on three main observations: (1) barring exceptions, detention occurs under regimes resembling criminal imprisonment; (2) immigration detainees tend to experience the detention as a kind of punishment, and (3) various policy makers have publicly stated that immigration detention is meant to pressure detainees into leaving.…”

“…Two main types exist: (1) preadmission detention at the border, involving foreigners not admitted to the state's territory, and (2) preexpulsion detention of foreigners whose stay in the territory is, has, or is likely to become unauthorized. Although formally not a punishment, governments do use immigration detention to deter unwanted immigrants from the territory (Campesi 2015, DeBono 2013Hasselberg 2014;Kalhan 2010;Leerkes and Broeders 2010;Mainwaring 2012;Martin 2012;Pickering and Weber 2014). That claim rests on three main observations: (1) barring…”