“I imagine a future that looks more like United States history than United States present. I imagine a future in which immigration prisons do not exist.”
Those provocative lines come from the conclusion of Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking up Immigrants, a new 200-page plea for Americans to rethink our base assumptions about migration and incarceration. Released December 3, the book is the second title from University of Denver law professor and longtime blogger César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. The author’s timing is apt, as President Donald Trump’s xenophobia-laced first term draws to a close and Democrats debate the priorities of a possible new administration in 2021.
García Hernández, a Rio Grande Valley native, suggests that to understand how we might transform our current immigrant detention regime—a sprawling system that incarcerates some 46,000 migrants as I write this—we must step back about 130 years. Though it may boggle the modern mind, America operated without immigrant detention during its first century of independent governance. It was only in the late 1890s that shipping companies began holding migrant passengers in squalid dockside warehouses so that the government could parse the worthy from the unworthy.
