Grants and Contracts Details
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.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 8/1/08 → 1/31/10 |
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