From The Bookshelves: Migrating to Prison by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernánde0’s 2019 book Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants has now been released in paperback form. With a new, updated (2023) epilogue.

Here’s the publisher’s pitch:

For most of America’s history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws.

Migrating to Prison takes a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. A leading voice for immigration reform, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explores the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s and looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law.

Now with an epilogue that brings it into the Biden administration, Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of who belongs in the United States

-KitJ