Immigration Detention and the Law: U.S. Policy and Legal Framework

This Global Detention Project working paper is intended to assist scholars, activists, practitioners, and concerned members of the public in taking stock of the current state of U.S. immigration detention policies. The paper covers everything from the country’s relevant international legal commitments and the grounds for detention provided in domestic law, to recent court rulings […]

Read More…

The Elastic Frontier

Concurrent with high-profile border control efforts, the United States has been busy quietly formulating and putting in place a strategy aimed at pushing migrant interdiction, detention, and deterrence into neighboring countries. These beyond-the-border efforts have led some observers to describe what they see as the southward migration of the U.S.-Mexico border, or to call the […]

Read More…

U.S. Immigration Policies: The Double Standard

This op-ed for the Chicago Trbiune assesses the U.S. detention policy enshrining a double standard between treatment of Haitians that was quietly issued in 2001 by the Bush administration in the hopes of deterring a wave of migrants and asylum seekers fleeing the rapidly deteriorating political and economic conditions in Haiti. Haitians making it to U.S. territory would […]

Read More…

Donde Esta La Frontera?

IN THE EARLY MORNING OF DECEMBER 3, 2001, Kanu Okany Patel, a 35- year-old undocumented migrant from Gujarat, India, furtively made his way to the bathroom of a government-run detention center in Guatemala City, tied one end of a sturdy cord he’d secretly stripped from a window curtain around his neck, the other around a […]

Read More…

Mexico Migrant Train - Sebastiao Salgado - Flynn/Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists August 2002