Doctoral Dissertation Research: Immigrant Family Detention: The Family, Law, Security, and Space in U.S Immigration Policy and Practice

  • Secor, Anna (PI)
  • Martin, Lauren (CoI)

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Description

PROJECT SUMMARY Background: On August 27, 2007, a federal district court ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unlawfully detained children at the 1. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas (In re: Hutto Settlement 2007). Filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the lawsuit charged that ICE violated a Congressional mandate to keep children in "non-penal, homelike environments." Located in a former medium-security prison, the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility retained the "institutional look and feel" of a prison, complete with random headcounts, uniforms, regimented eating schedules, restricted movement, locked doors, and barbed wire (Women's Commission 2007). The children's lawyers claimed - and the judge agreed - that the prison architecture of Hutto was fundamentally opposed to any conception of home, violating the rights of children to a stable and healthy atmosphere. In contrast, the 84-bed Berks County Family Care Shelter in Leesport, Pennsylvania, the only other immigrant family detention facility in the U.S., has received very little media and activist attention. For ICE, the Hutto facility met two divergent needs in immigration enforcement: (1) a post-9/11 mandate to eliminate vulnerabilities in the immigration system; and (2) a Congressional mandate to keep families together throughout the immigration process. ICE introduced family detention as part of the Secure Border Initiative (SBI), which entailed highly publicized on drug and human traffcking busts and workplace raids throughout the country. During these raids, parents were often detained while children were at school, and the children were subsequently processed as "unaccompanied minors." The development of family detention and its subsequent legal contest highlight how "homeland security" is refiguring long-standing immigration enforcement policies. Project Description: The proposed research examines how the spatial strategies of family detention-the ordering of migrants' bodies in detention facilities-are central to justifications for the policy and its legal contestation. Family detention combines spatial strategies by (1) segregating migrant families from the population; (2) differentiating between detainable and non-detainable migrants; (3) regulating the temporal and spatial location of migrants' bodies inside Berks and Hutto. To understand how these spatial strategies overlap with discourses of the family, security, and space, the research asks: (1) What do the different ways of using space in family detention practice and its legal contestation reveal about the relationship between space, the family, the child, and the migrant as political categories? (2) How do family detention policy and its public contestation reproduce and circulate spatialized conceptions of the family and the child? (3) What does the administration and regulation of family detention reveal about new connections between security and immigration enforcement practices? Using a multi-method approach, the research combines archival data on immigration enforcement policy towards families and semi-structured interviews with key policy makers, legal experts, advocates, and former detainees. Both the Hutto and Berks facilities will serve as sites for the research, providing comprehensive data on family detention policy. Combining quantitative content analysis with qualitative interpretive analysis, the research analyzes how the spatial strategies and discourses of family detention rely upon localized applications of immigration law and policy at detention center sites. Intellectual Merit: The proposed research contributes a rich empirical analysis of an understudied geographical phenomenon: the detention of migrant families. In geography, immigration research has analyzed how transnational labor markets, policy, and individual and collective identities have changed as a result of mobility. These studies do not, however, examine the impact of immigration enforcement policy and practice on these processes, nor what happens to migrants between arrest and deportation. Linking the spatial strategies of family detention practice to the circulation of legal and political discourses of the family, the child, the migrant, and security, the proposed research will contribute to geographical research on U.S. immigration policy, immigration enforcement practice, and family immigration. Wider Impacts: Though the U.S. Congress did not pass the 2007 Secure America through Verification and Enforcement (SAVE) Act, this legislation specifically names the T. Don Hutto facility as its model for a new family detention center. Immigration detention has risen from 95,000 in 2001 to over 300,000 in 2006, and the Department of Homeland Security has received funding for 6,700 additional detention beds. Despite these expansions, a single study of family detention exists (Women's Commission 2007). Distributed to governmental and non-governmental immigration policy-makers, the results of this research will provide new information and analysis about the legal, political, and material implications of family detention.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date8/1/081/31/10

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