Health, Violence & Immigrant Detention

“Peeking Behind the Veil: Investigating Health and Violence in U.S. Immigrant Detention Centers” seeks to understand how race and punishment intersect to produce health disparities in immigrant detention centers.

To date, we have found that punitive capacity (sexual assaults, physical assaults, dispersion of chemical weapons, disturbances, use of restraints and SWAT deployment) predicts deaths, attempted suicides and medical/psychiatric service referrals outside of the facility. Quite surprisingly, we also find that punitive capacity is unrelated to facility standards, access to legal counsel, and detainee grievances.

Because leaders across the political spectrum agree that mass imprisonment is inefficient, costly, and a chief purveyor of increased racial and economic inequality, there are increased calls for an end to mass imprisonment. In contrast, the U.S. detention system has grown five-fold while enshrouded in darkness behind a bureaucratic veil stitched together with indemnification clauses and laced with a host of other legal jargon.

We argue that detention, like imprisonment, is also a form of punishment despite being an administrative (non-criminal) process for the purposes of deportation. While immigrants do have limited rights (and, in some cases, due process) in comparison to criminals, the power of detention is capriciously exercised over their daily lives, making the detention center a site of vulnerability for marginalized populations.

In 2004, 32 people died in custody at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities, marking the high point for migrant detainee deaths. In fact, between 2003-2015, over 150 deaths occurred across public and private ICE detention facilities. Despite the dangerous conditions, immigrant detention facilities routinely pass federal audits.

These facts point towards a few basic questions that we investigate in our initial piece, “With Mass Deportation Comes Mass Punishment: Punitive Capacity, Health, and Standards in U.S. Immigrant Detention,” published in 2018 in the “Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Crime.”