Abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Centers Essay

Introduction

The United States’ immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) detention centers should be abolished since they are intertwined with the country’s racist history and perpetuate the legacy of injustices meted on racial and ethnic minorities. Over the years, imprisonment has become a defining feature of America’s immigration law enforcement and has aggravated the country’s mass incarceration challenge. The ICE detention centers stem from immigration criminalization, which reflects a deep-seated narrative of alleged criminal behavior of racial minorities and justifies the deployment of state punishment as a means of controlling them. In this regard, the concept of immigration imprisonment is the outcome of same rhetoric and policies, which established the mass incarceration systems as a tool of racial subordination of stereotyped communities. Additionally, the exponential privatization of immigrant detention centers illustrates the inextricable link between capitalism and commodification of racial minorities. Moreover, this system is inhumane, costly, socially destructive, and an inadequate response to the complex societal issues contributing to crimes. Although the abolition of ICE detention centers could potentially encourage the violation of the country’s immigration policies, they constitute a tool for racial subordination and exacerbate the problem of mass incarceration.

Aggravation of Prison Overpopulation

Over the years, imprisonment has increasingly become the most defining feature of America’s immigration law enforcement. Consequently, thousands of immigrants spend time in prison or secure immigration detention center due to some real or perceived transgressions of the law. Hernandez (2017) notes that an estimated 400,000 people are detained every year by ICE due to suspected or confirmed violation of civil immigration law. In 2018, about 70% of the immigrants held in detention centers were mandatorily detained, implying that their incarceration was automatic and statutorily required without any individualized assessment (Cullen, 2018). These figures illustrate the United States’ overreliance on imprisonment as the default punishment response, which aggravates an already overstretched prison system. Notably, the rapid expansion of the immigration detention centers can be attributed to the mandatory detention laws (Gilman & Romero, 2019). From this perspective, the ICE detention centers do not serve any distinctively beneficial purpose for the nation but inherently worsens the mass incarceration crisis. Therefore, the immigration detention centers should be abolished and replaced with an alternative system that deemphasizes imprisonment of immigrants.

Racist History and Perpetuation of Racial Subordination

ICE detention centers are inextricably interlinked with the United States racist history and operate in a way that perpetuates and entrenches subordination of racial minorities. According to Hernandez (2017), the concept of immigration imprisonment reflects the historical deliberate and targeted degradation and disapproval of specific groups of people. Misra et al. (2021) corroborate this perspective and contend that the detention of immigrants is a racialized coercive practice of social control designed to regulate the mobility of the nonwhites. For instance, the narratives that fuel these detentions stem primarily from perceived criminal tendencies of ethnic and racial minorities and the need to deploy state punishment as means of controlling them. In this regard, the entire structuring of the current detention system is anchored on the country’s racist history that is built on stereotypes against racial minorities.

Additionally, the United States has a long history of detaining immigrants entering the country, particularly from Africa, Asia, and Central America. For instance, in the late 1892 and 1910, the United States established detention stations in Angel and Ellis Islands, respectively, in which immigrants entering the country would be held temporarily for various checkups. Similarly, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers based on their race. In the 1980s, the government developed an elaborate mass detention system to respond to the rising influx of Haitian and Cuban refugees fleeing from the totalitarian governments and civil war (Massey, 2020). In 1981, President Regan’s administration escalated the detention programs by developing policies that sought to punish and deter Latin American immigrants entering the United States (Macias-Rojas, 2018). These events illustrate the racist ideology underlying immigrant detention and explain the patterns of disproportionate incarceration of people considered as outsiders and criminalizing their movement based on their racial identities (Aiken & Silverman, 2021). From this perspective, ICE detention centers should be abolished since they perpetuate racist philosophies and entrench racial subordination.

Interlink with Capitalism and Commodification of Racial Minorities

The exponential growth of ICE detention facilities in recent years is a phenomenon fueled by capitalistic philosophies and economic exploitation of racial minorities. Notably, the United States has built an expansive immigrant detention system holding thousands of people at any given time in numerous, privately operated facilities. According to Martin (2021), America’s migration control practices have created new ways through which immigrants have been commodified. In this regard, private entities integrated in the enforcement of immigration laws have been causal and central to the rapid expansion of the detention system (Gilman & Romero, 2019). Georgi (2019) argues that the growth of carceral economies has subsequently resulted in an aggressive criminalization of racialized immigrants and made imprisonment the default policy response for immigration. This commodification of racial minorities is evidenced in the aggressive lobbying by private companies operating the detention centers for the government to pursue new and expanded bases of incarceration. In this regard, the exponential growth of ICE detention centers is a manifestation of the extent to which racial minorities transiting to the United States have been commodified and should therefore be abolished.

Further, ICE detention centers have been overrun by private interests and primarily exist to facilitate the functionality of the United States’ capitalist systems. This implies that the enforcement of immigration laws has mutated into a labor control policy and revenues generation tools. Jefferis (2019) and Booth (2020) contend that this aspect has resulted in the eventual over-privatization of immigration detention compared to criminal incarceration. For instance, the criminalization of immigration and carceral spaces have, over the years, been used as tools of fixing labor supply issues and connecting the different circuits in the value chain. Notably, these economic interests have increasingly become embedded into the country’s immigration policies and made admissibility decisions dependent on such factors as migrants’ marketability and value. From this perspective, it is evident that the ICE detention centers have been overtaken by private interests and converted to labor holding spaces. Therefore, these facilities should be abolished since they now serve capitalistic interests of individuals and reap sizeable profits.

Ineffective Response in Building Safe Communities

The United States has justified the existence and expansion of ICE detention centers as strategic safeguards of protecting communities from dangerous noncitizens seeking to enter the country. However, multiple studies indicate that criminality levels of undocumented immigrants fall below those of native-born United States citizens and legal immigrants (Light et al., 2020). Immigration opponents often claim that unauthorized immigrants pose a threat to public safety compared to legal migrants and native citizens. According to Ousey & Kubrin (2018) and Orrenius and Zavodny (2019) note that multiple evidence-based assessments and studies reveal lower arrests and convictions of undocumented immigrants compared to other categories of citizens. In this regard, the influx of people into the United States from other countries who cross the border illicitly does not correspond to a rise in crime rates by immigrants. For instance, the aggressive border enforcement and stringent deployment of immigration laws don not necessarily translate to lower crime rates in the country. Therefore, ICE detention centers do not play any role in enhancing public safety and minimizing criminalities.

Moreover, detention and enforcement of immigrants undermine the development of safe communities. Notably, the processes and activities undertaken in ICE detention facilities destabilize communities through the creation of fear and erosion of trust in public institutions. The resultant anxiety triggers detrimental consequences as people become increasingly afraid of engaging in such community activities as sending their children to school and attending religious gatherings (American Journal of Community Psychology, 2018). Notably, the immigration court proceedings are of civil nature and seeks to ensure that detainees attend hearings and comply with the judges’ orders. In this regard, the none of the people in ICE custody has been convicted or facing criminal charges. However, despite this fact, detainees are already undergoing punishment from the punitive detention system. Thus, the immigration detention facilities should be abolished since they undermine the development of safe communities and erode public trust in state institutions.

ICE Detention Centers are Associated with Adverse Health Outcomes

ICE detention centers reinforce the systemic and institutional racism in the United States, which cause disproportionate harm to the detainees. These facilities inflict lifelong trauma to detainees and in some instance, even death of immigrants. Incidences of medical neglect, sexual assault, violent abuse, and living in unsanitary conditions are commonplace, and adversely affect the overall health of the detainees (Saadi et al., 2021; Saadi et al., 2020). These problems are compounded by such practices as family separation, which have been associated with psychological trauma and life-long mental illnesses. In this regard, the ICE detention centers are a major cause of numerous health problems among the immigrants and should be abolished.

Rebuttal

Although the ICE detention centers are punitive and designed to discourage the influx of immigrants into the United States, their abolition could potentially encourage more people to enter the country. Notably, the United States prominently ranks among the most desired immigrant destination in the world. This implies that any given time, there are thousands of people exploring for ways, legal or illegal, of entering the United States. Notably, a significant proportion of these people are discouraged by the ruthless and punitive immigration imprisonment and the subsequent deportation into their countries of origin. From this perspective, the abolition of ICE detention centers could trigger an influx of immigrants into the United States. Therefore, these imprisonment facilities should be preserved since they function as an effective gateway of immigrants into the country.

Conclusion

ICE detention centers have increasingly become a prominent feature of the United States immigration law enforcement policy. These facilities are racist and are inextricably linked with the country’s desire to subordinate racial minorities. Their establishment is motivated by historic and deep-seated stereotypes of alleged criminal habits of nonwhites. Consequently, they continue to perpetuate the notion that racial minorities are inherently dangerous and should therefore be punitively barred from entering the country. From these dimensions, these facilities should be abolished and replaced with more humane and nonpunitive immigrant law enforcement mechanisms that are not anchored on imprisonment.

References

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