Doctoral Dissertation Research: Immigrant Family Detention: The Family, Law, Security, and Space in U.S. Immigration Policy and Practice

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In 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the expansion of family detention as part of its Secure Border Initiative. Since then, immigrant and asylum-seeking families have been detained at two facilities: the Berks County Family Care Shelter in Leesport, Pennsylvania and the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas. While immigration research has examined labor markets, policy, individual and collective identities, and citizenship practices, these studies have not analyzed the role of immigration enforcement practices in the immigration process. Seeking to fill this gap, this research examines how the spatial strategies of family detention are central to justifications for the policy and its legal contestation. Family detention combines spatial strategies by (1) segregating migrant families from the population; (2) differentiating between detainable and non-detainable migrants; (3) regulating the temporal and spatial location of migrants' inside Berks and Hutto. To understand how these spatial strategies overlap with discourses of the family, security, and space, the research asks: (1) What do the different ways of using space in family detention practice and its legal contestation reveal about the relationship between space, the family, the child, and the migrant as political categories? (2) How do family detention policy and its public contestation reproduce and circulate spatialized conceptions of the family and the child? (3) What does the administration and regulation of family detention reveal about new connections between security and immigration enforcement practices? Using a multi-method approach, the research combines archival data on immigration enforcement policy towards families and semi-structured interviews with key policy makers, legal experts, advocates, and former detainees. The study examines the operation of the only two existing family detention facilities, Hutto and Berks, providing comprehensive and comparative data on family detention practices. Combining quantitative content analysis with qualitative interpretive analysis, the research analyzes how the spatial strategies and discourses of family detention rely upon localized applications of immigration law and policy at detention center sites. The research contributes an empirical analysis of an understudied geographical phenomenon: the detention of migrant families. Recent legislation specifically names the T. Don Hutto facility as its model for a new family detention center, yet a single study of family detention exists from which to evaluate family detention policy (Women's Commission 2007). In geography, immigration research has analyzed how transnational labor markets, policy, and individual and collective identities have changed as a result of mobility. These studies do not, however, examine the impact of immigration enforcement policy and practice on these processes, nor what happens to migrants between arrest and deportation. Linking the spatial strategies of family detention practice to the circulation of legal and political discourses of the family, the child, the migrant, and security, this analysis will reveal how homeland security concerns have encouraged the expansion of detention and deportation practices to new populations. Thus, the research will contribute an analysis of how spatialized configurations of the family can change policy, contributing a political geographic conceptualization of family detention to multidisciplinary research on security, migration, and kinship. Distributed to governmental and non-governmental immigration policy-makers and published in academic journals, the results of this research will provide new information and analysis about the legal, political, and material implications of family detention.