Policing, detention, deportation, and resistance: situating immigrant justice and carcerality in the 21st century.

• Author: Lawston, Jodie Michelle

IN MAY 2008, THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE REPORTED THAT THE CORRECTIONS Corporation of America (CCA) announced plans to build a 3,000-bed mega-prison in San Diego, California, which if built would be the largest immigrant detention center in the United States (Berestein, 2008). On May 11,2008, the Washington Post reported that since 2001, the number of immigrant detainees over the course of each year has more than tripled, to 311,000 (Priest and Goldstein, 2008). The New Yorker reported that whole families, many of whom have committed no crime, are incarcerated in the privately run Hutto immigration prison located in a remote area of south Texas (Talbot, 2008). The Washington Post reported numerous abuses of immigration detainees, ranging from inadequate or improper health care and rape of female detainees to the adverse psychological effects of detention on children (Berestein, 2008).

Situating the Problem

In many ways, passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was a pivotal point in the criminalization of migrants, setting the stage for increases in deportation and detention, as well as the abuses that immigrants endure once detained. IRCA was the first major legislation to initiate the militarization of the border, while also contributing to the increased presence of migrants in the United States by providing amnesty to over two million people and allowing for family reunification. The criminalization of migrants was crystallized in the national imagination in 1996, when the Republican Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which reclassified a number of minor offenses, such as drunk driving or simple assault, as aggravated felonies. Two additional federal laws that also passed in 1996--the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)--are manifestations of the ideological merging of immigration with state dependency and criminality. The events of September 11 further fueled anti-immigrant sentiment and reactions, including an increased reliance on detention and prosecution of immigrants.

The desire to criminalize immigrants is also exemplified in more recent legislation, such as the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437)--known as the Sensenbrenner Bill--which attempted to redefine undocumented migrants as felons and to designate any assistance to this group as criminal and punishable by law. Although housing someone, offering food, or providing a ride may seem trivial, had H.R. 4437 been signed into law such acts would have been turned into defining moments leading to one's imprisonment.

The Sensenbrenner Bill highlighted the plasticity of the line that marks the difference between civil and criminal matters. Unintentionally, the proposition created an instinctive consciousness of the ways in which the social construction of crime participates in the labor of regulating society. This realization contributed to the eruption of the immigrant rights movements in 2006. Although there is a long history of immigrant rights organizing across the United States, this moment seemed to almost immediately coalesce into a massive national movement...