“Not a Prison”

Chapter 3 examines how central Louisiana became the unlikely site for the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s first new long-term detention facility and hub for deportation. Faced with high unemployment following the collapse of the local lumber industry, the enterprising mayor of Oakdale spearheaded a campaign to secure the new federal facility. Simultaneously, the Department of Justice debated which agency was best suited to carry out the new mandate of long-term detention of noncitizens. The INS did not have the carceral experience of the Bureau of Prisons, but because migrant detention was not a criminal justice punishment, this imprisonment threatened to create legal liabilities for the government. These legal questions also informed jurisdictional conflict over where this new facility would be sited. Oakdale’s efforts were jeopardized as Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani backed the proposal of the Bureau of Prisons to run migrant detention near one of its prisons in Oklahoma. The forceful backing of Louisiana politicians eventually won the facility for Oakdale.

Onshore Expansion

Chapter 6 explores how political crises over migration and crime dovetailed with each other to cement detention into the landscape materially and discursively. Criminal legislation passed from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s repeated the pattern established earlier in Boats, Borders, and Bases: asylum seekers are detained, followed by executive orders and congressional legislation authorizing these practices. Like previous efforts to deter asylum seekers and other unauthorized migrants, criminalization established far-reaching legal and institutional bases for expanding enforcement and detention. As with earlier treatment of “undesirable” Cubans and “bogus” Haitian asylum seekers, the figure of the criminal alien was consolidated through its juxtaposition with notions of legal, good, and contributing refugees and immigrants. As migration and criminal justice policy became more closely entwined, the basis for expanding detention shifted more explicitly from deterrence to a more robust tool of punishment and expulsion.

“Uncle Sam Has a Long Arm”

Chapter 4 examines how migrant detention became one part of the vast carceral landscape in Florence and Eloy, Arizona. Neither proximity to the border nor privatization adequately explains the patchwork of carceral facilities in this central Arizona locale. Rather, the landscape of migrant detention builds on multiple histories of confinement, including WWII prisoner of war camps and Florence’s status as Arizona’s prison town, thereby setting the stage to examine the growing interconnections between migrant detention and the burgeoning prison system. The chapter further explores the legal histories of expulsion that form the basis for the development of “criminal alien” legislation, bolstering rationales for detention construction.

Militarizing Migration

Chapter 2 discusses the politics of deterring asylum seekers by exploring the simultaneous efforts to find new detention space for Cubans and Haitians who had already arrived in the United States and to develop “contingency” space in the event of another mass migration. This chapter focuses on the pivotal role of military bases in the ad hoc creation of U.S. migration policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations. Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers who arrived in 1980 found themselves confined on separate military facilities from Florida to Wisconsin and Arkansas. The search and negotiations surrounding new places to detain reveal racialized imaginations and seemingly irrational investments in new places to detain. The deeply contingent and contested use of decommissioned military bases led ultimately to the search for more permanent detention space.

Coda

The coda reflects on contemporary migration crises in order to consider how nearly four decades of commitment to deterrence and criminalization have led to a robust policing and detention infrastructure that harms already vulnerable groups of people and resists oversight and reform. Over two million people were deported during President Obama’s time in office. As a result, hundreds of thousands were separated from their families, and most struggled to repay debts from migration and make a living in economies that have undergone privatization and deregulation. This final essay reflects on the recurrence of crises during the Obama administration by examining the arrivals of Central American youth and the new round of crises presented in the opening months of the Donald Trump administration. The coda concludes with a discussion of contemporary enforcement efforts in the Caribbean, noting that history continues with Haitians as a seemingly permanent exception.

Post-9/11 Policing

This concluding chapter maps changes to detention and border enforcement policy immediately before and after September 11, 2001. It counters much contemporary scholarship that places 9/11 as a significant turning point in the securitization and criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers. While not denying the seismic securitization that followed the attacks, this chapter places these changes in historical context to show that the continued cycle of racialized and geopoliticized exclusions that had already been well rehearsed in U.S. border enforcement and immigration law and detention and deterrence policies and practices.

Safe Haven

Chapter 5 tells the history of the Bush- and Clinton-era creation of an offshore detention archipelago in the Caribbean. This transnational Caribbean history is an important, immediate precursor to the expansion deterrence operations along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1990s and the use of Guantánamo Naval Base during the War on Terror. As the numbers of Haitians and Cubans held on Guantánamo exceeded forty thousand, the United States opened camps for Cubans on its military base in Panama and built additional “safe haven” sites in other countries in the Caribbean. We show how the use of offshore sites was designed to prevent the arrivals of asylum seekers on U.S. shores. This moment provides a window into the insipid lengths that the executive branch went to in order to redraw legal geographies and thereby separate domestic territory from international waters (and international refugee law).

“America’s ‘Boat People’”

Chapter 1 situates the development of the 1980 Refugee Act within the context of efforts to deter Haitian asylum seekers. The chapter argues that the exclusionary Haitian Program would plant the seeds of a racialized deterrence policy. The history this chapter traces shows how humanitarianism and deterrence are simultaneous and symbiotic. U.S. foreign policy manifests in humanitarian rescue and migration control. This chapter illustrates how the racialized construction of a dichotomous discourse of rescue versus deterrence, good versus bad migrant, and bona fide versus bogus refugee animates exclusionary migration practices and policies.

Introduction

The introduction situates the scope of the study and the key arguments advanced in Boats, Borders, and Bases. It details research questions, methodology, and key concepts the book uses to explore the interrelations between border fortification, migration deterrence, militarization, and criminalization. It presents prevailing explanations for the remote locations of detention facilities and proposes a more systematic approach for explaining the geography of U.S. detention expansion.