Immigration Article of the Day, Down that Wrong Road: US Immigration Detention Electronic Monitoring ‘Alternatives’ as Net-Widening by Stephanie Silverman
Here is the abstract:
Despite incarcerating the world’s largest immigration detainee population, the United States funds only one official ‘alternative to detention’ (ATD) program. Currently in its fourth iteration, the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) is a public-private partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the private firm,
Behavioral Interventions, Incorporated, a GEO Group subsidiary. ISAP combines more traditional monitoring requirements such as home visits, with contemporary surveillance technology such as a smartphone application and a nonremovable, 5.5-ounce ankle shackle. Although there were 20,000 ISAP enrollees in May 2020, this program remains relatively understudied outside of the American immigration law scholarship.
This article explains and analyzes why ISAP is the wrong road for DHS as an immigration management strategy. The article traces a history of ISAP and the politics of electronically monitoring ‘risky’ individuals more generally. Amongst its findings, the article reveals that before the pandemic, the US was detaining the same number or more people as it expanded ISAP; this finding implies that ‘e-carceration’ is widening the overall net of people DHS subjects to coercive and violent state power. The article concludes that ISAP is a techno-solutionist panacea that inflicts grave harms on users and their communities while deflecting attention and resources from the much more complex issue of immigration and border control.
IE