Resisting Immigration Detention: Dynamics of Social Change

• In Event: Enforcing the Border: Criminalization, Fear and Detention in the Age of Punishment

Abstract

This paper focuses on acts of resistance involving detained immigrants from the greater New York City metropolitan area during the period that started with the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and ended with passage of the repressive Sensenbrenner bill in the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2005. Applying qualitative and quantitative methods within an interdisciplinary framework of power dynamics, incarceration, and social change theory, this research project tracks interactive feedback between diverse forms of resistance to detention; public opinion; media coverage; and the shifting terrain of immigration detention in law, policy, and practice, exploring interrelationships between individual and collective acts of resistance taking place inside and outside spaces of detention, and by actors including detainees, former detainees, family members, activists, lawyers, and journalists.

Author

• Jane Guskin, The City University of New York