Edited by Robert T. Chase

This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty. As these studies depict the institutional development and state scaffolding of overlapping carceral regimes, they also consider how prisoners and immigrants resisted such oppression and violence by drawing on the transnational politics of human rights and liberation, transcending the isolation of incarceration, detention, deportation and the boundaries of domestic law.

Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 440p.

Edited by Gale Burford, John Braithwaite and Valerie Braithwaite

In Restorative and Responsive Human Services, Gale Burford, John Braithwaite, and Valerie Braithwaite bring together a distinguished collection providing rich lessons on how regulation in human services can proceed in empowering ways that heal and are respectful of human relationships and legal obligations. The human services are in trouble: combining restorative justice with responsive regulation might redeem them, renewing their well-intended principles. Families provide glue that connects complex systems. What are the challenges in scaling up relational practices that put families and primary groups at the core of health, education, and other social services? This collection has a distinctive focus on the relational complexity of restorative practices. How do they enable more responsive ways of grappling with complexity than hierarchical and prescriptive human services? Lessons from responsive business regulation inform a re-imagining of the human services to advance wellbeing and reduce domination. Readers are challenged to re-examine the perverse incentives and contradictions buried in policies and practices. How do they undermine the capacities of families and communities to solve problems on their own terms? This book will interest those who harbor concerns about the creep of domination into the lives of vulnerable citizens. It will help policymakers and researchers to re-focus human services to fundamental outcomes at the foundation of sustainable democracies.

New York; London: Routledge, 2019. 261p.

By Julia Black & Zoe Sigman

More than 50,000 people worldwide have lost their lives during their migratory journeys since IOM's Missing Migrants Project began documenting deaths in 2014, according to a new IOM report published today (23/11). Despite the increasing loss of life, little action has been taken by governments in countries of origin, transit, and destination to address the ongoing global crisis of missing migrants.

Berlin: Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC) and The International Organization for Migration (IOM). 2022. 13p.

By Clara Long

A US Border Patrol agent kneed a woman in the lower pelvis, leaving bruises and pain days later, according to her statement to a government official screening her asylum claim. A CBP officer hit another asylum applicant so hard he was knocked unconscious and suffered brain swelling. An officer wearing a green uniform, consistent with those of the Border Patrol, tried to coerce a different asylum applicant into giving him oral sex in exchange for being released from custody. In another incident, a Border Patrol agent or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer forced a girl to undress and then inappropriately touched her. Another asylum applicant was bitten in the testicle by a Border Patrol service dog, denied medical treatment for about one month and ultimately had to have his testicle surgically removed. CBP officials appeared to withhold food from a different man in a freezing cold holding facility until he agreed to sign a paper in a language he did not understand. These are just some of the over 160 allegations of abuse catalogued in internal US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports received by Human Rights Watch under the Freedom of Information Act. The records, though heavily redacted, demonstrate that asylum officers within US Citizenship and Immigration Services, another component of DHS, have repeatedly provided internal reports on allegations of assault, sexual abuse, harsh detention conditions, denial of medical care, discriminatory and dehumanizing treatment and due process violations at the border. The US should take urgent and sustained action to stop

• More.....

  such abuses by transforming migrant border reception and DHS accountability practices, including ensuring redress for migrants and asylum seekers who have been harmed.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2021. 83p.

By Hanna Gros

Despite its reputation as a refugee-welcoming and multicultural country, Canada detains thousands of people on immigration-related grounds every year in often abusive conditions. This includes many fleeing persecution and seeking protection in Canada. Based on interviews with former immigration detainees and their relatives, mental health experts, academics, lawyers, civil society representatives, and government officials, “I Didn’t Feel Like a Human in There”, a report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, documents how people in immigration detention are regularly handcuffed, shackled, and held with little to no contact with the outside world. The report finds that many are held in provincial jails with the regular jail population and even subjected to solitary confinement. Canadian law does not establish time limits on detention and immigration detainees can be held for months or years. Many immigration detainees develop suicidal thoughts as they begin to lose hope that they will be released. Individuals with psychosocial disabilities experience discrimination throughout the immigration detention process. They are more likely to be detained in provincial jails rather than immigration holding centers, and many also face significant barriers to release with stricter release conditions. The report calls on the Canadian authorities to gradually abolish immigration detention. Under no circumstances should a person for immigration-related reasons be treated in a punitive manner, including being subjected to solitary confinement, or detained in facilities used for criminal law enforcement, such as jails, or in jail-like facilities.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2021. 125p.

By Michael Garcia Bochenek

In the two years since the “Remain in Mexico” program began in January 2019, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has sent more than 69,000 people to Mexico while their US asylum claims are pending. This number includes families with children of all ages, some of them with disabilities, including newborns, infants, and toddlers. The program applies to nationals of all Latin American countries, including Brazilians and members of Indigenous communities who do not speak Spanish. Formally known as the “Migration Protection Protocols” (MPP), the program is anything but protective: it has sent people to some of Mexico’s most dangerous cities and needlessly and foreseeably exposed them to considerable risk of serious harm. Those interviewed for this report described being subjected to rape or attempted rape and other sexual assault, abduction for ransom, extortion, armed robbery, and other crimes, in many cases immediately after US authorities sent them to Mexico or as they returned from US immigration court hearings. In some cases, Mexican immigration officers or police committed these crimes. In theory, the MPP has two safeguards against return to harm, but neither is effective in practice. First, US officials are not supposed to send people to Mexico under the program if an asylum officer finds that they are likely to face threats to their lives or freedom or if they would be tortured there. Second, DHS has said that it will not place “vulnerable” people in the MPP. These exemptions are rarely granted, even though Human Rights Watch found many cases that

• More.....

  would qualify. MPP hearings were suspended in March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and had not resumed by the end of December 2020. Thousands of people are concentrated in dangerous Mexican border towns indefinitely, living lives in limbo, many dependent on the generosity of humanitarian groups and volunteers for accommodation, food, and health care. Many of the people interviewed for this report described changes in their children’s behavior, causing parents increasing feelings of anxiety for their children’s well-being. The Biden administration should immediately terminate the MPP program and allow those placed in the MPP to reenter the United States and remain until their asylum claims are resolved.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2021. 115p.

By Elizabeth G. Kennedy and Alison Parker,, et al.

The US is deporting Salvadorans to death and abuse. Deported to Danger identifies 138 cases of Salvadorans who, since 2013, were killed after deportation from the United States and more than 70 others who were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted, or tortured. People deported to El Salvador are sometimes targeted by the same abusers they originally fled—such as gangs or former intimate partners—or are targeted for reasons, such as their status as a deportee, their neighborhood of origin, or perceived wealth, that US government officials should take into account when deciding their eligibility for asylum or other protection from deportation. US authorities should strengthen, not further weaken, asylum protections, ensuring that all asylum-seekers receive dignified treatment via procedures that ensure full and fair consideration of their claims. Human Rights Watch also urges the United States to take a step further and offer “complementary protection” to anyone, including Salvadorans, facing a real risk of serious harm upon return. Instead of closing the door on Salvadorans and others fleeing their homelands, the US should ensure their protection.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2020. 123p.

By New York Lawyers for the Public Interest

“Still Detained and Denied,” documents serious, often life-threatening deficiencies in the medical care provided to New Yorkers in area immigration detention facilities. The healthcare crisis in immigration detention has worsened over the past several years and has become even more urgent as COVID-19 spreads through communities, including in federal detention facilities and local jails. Based on more than 100 people’s experiences in New York and New Jersey immigration detention jails, NYLPI’s report outlines the government’s damaging and sometimes deadly failures to provide adequate medical treatment, identifies the coronavirus pandemic as an additional reason to release all immigrant detainees, and makes extensive recommendations for change.

New York: New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, 2020. 37p.

By Arezo Malakooti

The overall objective of this study is to understand the political economy of migrant detention in Libya, in both the official and non-official detention systems. The study was launched in October 2018 and the report was finalized in April 2019. The study was conducted by means of a qualitative approach, based on primary field research spanning four research modules: literature review, initial screening of detention centres in Libya, primary field interviews with migrants and with a variety of key informants (armed groups, authorities, smugglers, detention-centre staff, programme implementers). The methodology was route focused and, as such, involved interviews in four countries: Niger, Libya, Italy and Malta. A total of 85 key informant interviews were conducted and 75 in-depth interviews were conducted with migrants (160 in-depth interviews in total).

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2019. 111p.

By Ceres Policy Research Institute

As detention capacity increases, so do ICE apprehensions. This link illuminates certain truths for the immigrant rights movement. If the existence of an immigration detention center brings the harms of ICE’s enforcement presence to a community, the inverse tells us that immigrant community members become safer when a detention facility shuts down. Moreover, it sheds light on how eliminating detention capacity is crucial to scaling back ICE’s enforcement regime. Because immigration detention is the crux of ICE’s deportation pipeline and a driving force behind enforcement activity patterns, shrinking and ultimately abolishing the detention system must be a priority in the fight for immigrant justice. ICE has built and expanded a massive infrastructure of immigration jails, surveillance programs, and enforcement agents. The current enforcement-centered response to migration, supported by ever-increasing Congressional appropriations, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deportations each year. Over the last two decades, the budget for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which includes its account for immigration detention, has quadrupled. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, detention levels hit historic peaks of more than 50,000 people per day.

Detention Watch Network and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, 2022. 10p.

By Jorge Ramos with Kristina Cordero (Translator)

On May 14, 2003, a familiar risk-filled journey, taken by hopeful Mexican immigrants attempting to illegally cross into the United States, took a tragic turn. Inside a sweltering truck abandoned in Texas, authorities found at least 74 people packed into a "human heap of desperation." After months of investigation, a 25-year-old Honduran-born woman named Karla Chavez was found responsible for leading the human trafficking cell that led to this grisly tragedy in which 19 people died. Through interviews with survivors who had the courage to share their stories and conversations with the victims' families, and in examining the political implications of the incident for both U.S. and Mexican immigration policies, Jorge Ramos tells the story of one of the most heartbreaking episodes of our nation's turbulent history of immigration.

New York: Harper Collins, 2006. 208p.

By Anna O. Law

This book assesses the role of the federal judiciary in immigration and the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Neither court has played a static role across time. By the turn of the century, a division of labor had developed between the two courts whereby the Courts of Appeals retained their original function as error-correction courts, while the Supreme Court was reserved for the most important policy and political questions. Anna O. Law explores the consequences of this division for immigrant litigants, who are more likely to prevail in the Courts of Appeals because of advantageous institutional incentives that increase the likelihood of a favorable outcome. As this book proves, it is inaccurate to speak of an undifferentiated institution called "the federal courts" or "the courts," for such characterizations elide important differences in mission and function of the two highest courts in the federal judicial hierarchy.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 282p.

Edited by Anna Triandafyllidou

The Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies offers a comprehensive and unique study of the multi-disciplinary field of international migration and asylum studies. Utilising contemporary information and analysis, this innovative Handbook provides an in depth examination of legal migration management in the labour market and its affect upon families in relation to wider issues of migrant integration and citizenship. With a comprehensive collection of essays written by leading contributors from a broad range of disciplines including sociology of migration, human geography, legal studies, political sciences and economics, the Handbook is a truly multi-disciplinary book approaching the critical questions of: migration and the labour market; integration and citizenship; migration, families and welfare; irregular migration; smuggling and trafficking in human beings; asylum and forced migration. Organised into short thematic and geographical chapters the Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies provides a concise overview on the different topics and world regions, as well as useful guidance for both the starting and the more experienced reader. The Handbook’s expansive content and illustrative style will appeal to both students and professionals studying in the field of migration and international organisations.

Abingdon, Oxon, UK: New York: 2016. 416p.

Edited by Leanne Weber

This book provides a new point of departure for thinking critically and creatively about international borders and the perceived need to defend them, adopting an innovative ‘preferred future’ methodology. The authors critically examine a range of ‘border domains’ including law, citizenship, governance, morality, security, economy, culture and civil society, which provide the means and justification for contemporary border controls, and identify early signs that the dynamics of sovereignty and borders are being fundamentally transformed under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The goal is to locate potential pathways towards the preferred future of relaxed borders, and provide a foundation for a progressive politics dedicated to moving beyond mere critique of the harm and inequity of border controls and capable of envisaging a differently bordered world.

London; New York: Routledge, 2015. 212p.

By Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

When Beatles star John Lennon faced deportation from the U.S. in the 1970s, his lawyer Leon Wildes made a groundbreaking argument. He argued that Lennon should be granted “nonpriority” status pursuant to INS’s (now DHS’s) policy of prosecutorial discretion. In U.S. immigration law, the agency exercises prosecutorial discretion favorably when it refrains from enforcing the full scope of immigration law. A prosecutorial discretion grant is important to an agency seeking to focus its priorities on the “truly dangerous” in order to conserve resources and to bring compassion into immigration enforcement. The Lennon case marked the first moment that the immigration agency’s prosecutorial discretion policy became public knowledge. Today, the concept of prosecutorial discretion is more widely known in light of the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program, a record number of deportations and a stalemate in Congress to move immigration reform. Beyond Deportation is the first book to comprehensively describe the history, theory, and application of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law. It provides a rich history of the role of prosecutorial discretion in the immigration system and unveils the powerful role it plays in protecting individuals from deportation and saving the government resources. Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia draws on her years of experience as an immigration attorney, policy leader, and law professor to advocate for a bolder standard on prosecutorial discretion, greater mechanisms for accountability when such standards are

• More.....

  ignored, improved transparency about the cases involving prosecutorial discretion, and recognition of “deferred action” in the law as a formal benefit.

New York: New York University Press, 2015.

By Lisa (Leigh) Patel

Illegal. Undocumented. Remedial. DREAMers. All of these labels have been applied to immigrant youth. Using a combination of engaging narrative and rigorous analysis, this book<em>explores how immigrant youth are included in, and excluded from, various sectors of American society, including education. Instead of the land of opportunity, immigrant youth often encounter myriad new borders long after their physical journey to the United States is over. With an intimate storytelling style, the author invites readers to rethink assumptions about immigrant youth and what their often liminal positions reveal about the politics of inclusion in America.

New York: Teachers College Press, 2013. 144p.

By Lisa Meierotto

This book examines the convergence of conservation and security efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. The author presents a unique analysis of the history of Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, a federally protected border wilderness area. Beginning in the early 1990s, changes to U.S. immigration policy dramatically altered the political and natural landscape in and around Cabeza Prieta. In particular, the increasing presence of Border Patrol has contributed to environmental degradation in the wilderness. Complicated human rights concerns are also explored in the book. Protecting wildlife in an area with high rates of undocumented border-crossing and smuggling results in complex and sometimes controversial conservation policies. Ultimately, the observations and analysis presented in this book illustrate ways in which the politics of race and nationalism are subtly, but significantly, interwoven into border environmental and security policies.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 208p.

By Teresa Hayter

In this new edition of Open Borders, Teresa Hayter assesses the impact of the increasing severity of border controls since they were first introduced and makes the controversial case for their abolition. Hayter focuses on postwar immigration controls, especially the use of such controls against the peoples of former European colonies and East Europeans, and their effects on asylum seekers. She examines the recent history of European coordination of border controls and the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’. Hayter argues that the existence of controls leads to great suffering and abuse of human rights, and that immigration controls are racist and help legitimate racism. She demonstrates that immigration controls have actually had a limited impact on controlling numbers. To illustrate her arguments, she draws on empirical material, especially from Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, relating in particular to the use of detention, arbitrary decision-making and the denial of benefits. She compares British government policies with policies elsewhere in Europe and calls for the free movement of people and the abolition of border controls. The new edition brings this seminal work up to date with a lengthy preface exploring how the practices of the British government over the past few years has continued the process Hayter outlines in the main text – of abusive and irrational border controls and the criminalisation of entire communities. This second edition also updates the bibliography and list of campaigning groups, and ends with a new manifesto for a world without borders, declaring 'no one is illegal!'

London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004. 240p.

Edited by Agustín Escobar Latapí and Claudia Masferrer

This open access Regional Reader describes how Mexico - United States migration changed substantially during the first decade of the 21st Century. The book provides an in-depth analysis on the changes in the flows into and out of both countries, thus highlighting the issues arising from Mexico - US migration as well as addressing the large numbers of adults and children entering Mexico from the United States. It covers how this tidal change affects the Hispanic population of the U.S. and return migrants' reincorporation in Mexico; their jobs, access to school, health and access to health services, how fear became a dominant aspect of Mexicans’ lives in the U.S., and the role played by crime and social policy in Mexico.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2022. 278p.

By David Bacon

For two decades veteran photojournalist David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People Bacon explores the human side of globalization, exposing the many ways it uproots people in Latin America and Asia, driving them to migrate. At the same time, U.S. immigration policy makes the labor of those displaced people a crime in the United States. Illegal People explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, more migration, more immigration raids, and a more divided, polarized society.Through interviews and on-the-spot reporting from both impoverished communities abroad and American immigrant workplaces and neighborhoods, Bacon shows how the United States' trade and economic policy abroad, in seeking to create a favorable investment climate for large corporations, creates conditions to displace communities and set migration into motion. Trade policy and immigration are intimately linked, Bacon argues, and are, in fact, elements of a single economic system. In particular, he analyzes NAFTA's corporate tilt as a cause of displacement and migration from Mexico and shows how criminalizing immigrant labor benefits employers. For example, Bacon explains that, pre-NAFTA, Oaxacan corn farmers received subsidies for their crops. State-owned CONASUPO markets turned the corn into tortillas and sold them, along with milk and other basic foodstuffs, at low, subsidized prices in cities. Post-NAFTA, several things happened: the Mexican government was forced to end its

• More.....

  subsidies for corn, which meant that farmers couldn't afford to produce it; the CONASUPO system was dissolved; and cheap U.S. corn flooded the Mexican market, driving the price of corn sharply down. Because Oaxacan farming families can't sell enough corn to buy food and supplies, many thousands migrate every year, making the perilous journey over the border into the United States only to be labeled "illegal" and to find that working itself has become, for them, a crime. Bacon powerfully traces the development of illegal status back to slavery and shows the human cost of treating the indispensable labor of millions of migrants-and the migrants themselves-as illegal. Illegal People argues for a sea change in the way we think, debate, and legislate around issues of migration and globalization, making a compelling case for why we need to consider immigration and migration from a globalized human rights perspective.

Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. 272p.