Dignity Politics: Detention and Democracy in the U.S.

My research examines the political consequences of the modern immigrant detention system by powerfully integrating ten years of professional legal aid experience and interviews with eighty formerly detained non-citizens and their loved ones. I examine how immigrants experience detention. Under what conditions do they align themselves with other directly impacted people and denounce the carceral state? I advance a bottom-up account of resistance to detention, demonstrating how immigrants' experiences before, during, and after detention shape their behavioral strategies and demands for government accountability. The dissertation draws on fieldwork and interviews across five immigration court jurisdictions: Chicago, Baltimore, Arlington, Atlanta, and New Orleans. Against the conventional wisdom that carceral experiences are inherently politically alienating, I demonstrate how detention produces more heterogeneous participatory paths than previously understood.

When individuals espoused respectability politics in detention, the survival strategies employed included distancing, betrayal, and compliance. In the afterlife of imprisonment, individuals who opted for respectability politics continued minimizing detention harm and downplaying Black immigrant grievances. When individuals evoked dignity politics in custody, the survival strategies employed included particularistic resistance, naming, blaming, right-claiming practices, and non-violent uprisings characterized by work stoppages and hunger strikes. In the afterlife of detention, individuals who evoked dignity politics engaged in community care, mutual aid, and community organizing in hyper-local fights to shut down detention centers and oppose new jail construction. These individuals saw immigration detention as inextricably linked to the Black struggle for civil rights, abuse of authority in the criminal legal system, and cross-movement calls for abolition.

Non-citizens employed varying strategies while facing similar state strategies of incapacitation, including officials’ weaponization of federalism, to engage in blame-shifting, racial gaslighting, and racial capitalism with impunity. The study identifies systematic patterns of human and civil rights violations in detention, including discrimination, abuse and coercion, due process violations, medical and mental health neglect, and inhumane and substandard conditions. Theorizing non-citizens’ responses to detention elucidates broader inquiry on the state, citizenship, the formation of political identities, and intergroup relations. Other significant themes include digital surveillance and re-entry challenges in the afterlife of detention. I theorize that prior experiences of state violence in their countries of origin and U.S. regional detention regimes drive the emergent dignity politics of non-citizens.