Communities Not Cages: A Just Transition from Immigration Detention Economies

By Bob Libal with contributions from Setareh Ghandehari and Silky Shah

  Every day, thousands of people are cruelly deprived of their liberty in a vast system of mass immigration detention in the United States. For years, detained people and advocates have organized to close troubled immigration detention centers and exposed the horrors of a detention system rife with extreme negligence, abuse, and even death. Numerous studies document that detention is also wholly unnecessary.1 Despite overwhelming evidence that immigrants successfully navigate their immigration cases in community, the immigration detention system — now with over 230 facilities in the United States — has seen exponential growth across the last three presidential administrations. In just the last four years, the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) grew dramatically to an average daily population of more than 50,000 people in Fiscal Year (FY) 2019, by far the most in the agency’s history. This unprecendented expansion of detention was propelled not by changing migration trends, but by a resurgence of nativist and xenophobic rhetoric translated into harsher policies towards both arriving immigrants and long-term non-citizen residents. Detention expansion continued under the Trump administration despite draconian enforcement policies such as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), the expansion of the border wall, and Title 42, meant to keep people from    arriving at the border or seeking asylum once they did. Due to a variety of factors, including detention numbers trending down, an ongoing global pandemic, and a shifting political landscape, the Biden administration has an opportunity to begin the process of phasing out immigration detention entirely. This report addresses one stated barrier to detention center  closures — the economic impacts of detention centers on host communities

Washington, DC: Detention Watch Network 2021. 29p.