While international law protects the rights of individuals to seek asylum and to be treated humanely and with dignity, immigration detention, the practice of confining individuals accused of violating immigration law, has surfaced as a growing response to the large numbers of individuals and families on the move throughout the world in search of freedom, safety, and economic security. Detention has long been used as a strategy for enforcement of immigration laws across the globe, and has also been used as a tactic to dissuade and control future migration. The detention of immigrants consistently presents concerns about and allegations of civil and human rights violations and negative bio-psycho-social impacts on those detained. Given the contemporary expansion of the immigration detention system in the United States, this bibliography will focus primarily on the context of immigration detention within the United States. This bibliography includes selected scholarly resources from the social sciences, health, and legal fields to present an overview of immigration detention, the impact on survivors of violence and trauma, and detention alternatives. While the Global Detention Project and other nonprofit organizations aim to track the scope of immigration detention worldwide, numbers of individuals detained, as well as the number and location of detention facilities, immigration detention remain difficult to track. In the United States, the average daily population of immigration detention facilities in the United States had increased from 6,785 in 1994 to more than 38,000 in 2017. That number has risen to closer to 50,000 in recent years and manifests across a wide variety of facilities, including temporary and long-term holding facilities operated by a host of federal, state, local, and private for-profit entities. The US government has broad, though not absolute, power over immigration and immigration detention. Authorization of the detention of immigrants dates back to 1798 with the Alien Enemies Act, which allowed for the detention of immigrants from “hostile” countries during times of war. As of 1875, another series of laws expanded the framework of detention, in particular pertaining to the incarceration of individuals with criminal convictions. Further changes were made in 1952 with the Immigration and Nationality Act, then more drastically in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which served to begin a decades-long expansion of the US immigration detention system. This expansion has also led to numerous allegations of civil and human rights violations related to due process, exploitative labor practices, sexual and physical abuse, and inadequate medical care, as well as growing concern about the impact of immigration detention on survivors of violence and trauma, particularly children, women, and LGBTQ communities. The author would like to acknowledge the significant contributions of Jessenia Herzberg in researching and reviewing literature on immigration detention.
Gender, Violence, and Trauma in Immigration Detention in the United States