Immigration Article of the Day: David Hernández, Surrogates and Subcontractors: Flexibility and Obscurity in U.S. Immigrant Detention
David Hernández. “Surrogates and Subcontractors: Flexibility and Obscurity in U.S. Immigrant Detention,” in Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, edited by Nada Elia, David Hernández, Jodi Kim, Shana Redmond, Dylan Rodriguez, Sarita See, Duke University Press, 2016.
This recent book chapter ( Download Surrogates and Subcontractors CES Reader) critically analyzes privatized federal immigrant detention. Here is the conclusion to the introduction:
“This chapter briefly contextualizes contemporary securitization efforts providing examples of cumulative precedents and patterns in immigrant detention that help explain this regime’s ongoing obscurity and challenge its exceptionalist foundation. I illuminate the continuities of racial criminalization by exploring the detention regime’s historic reliance on surrogate partners domestically and internationally. I also problematize prevailing logics of reform and resistance to detention expansion such as the use of prosecutorial discretion to prioritize so-called criminals and grant relief to low-priority detainees1 often referred to as noncriminal or “innocent” noncitizens. Overall I seek to unmask the obscured discursive and institutional formations of immigrant detention in the United States1 checking its flexible and coercive technologies used to exercise state power and violence far beyond the control of undocumented migration.”
Given the Department of Justice’s recent decision to eliminate private contracting of prisons (but not immigrant detention), this chapter is timely.
KJ