Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2023

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Advisor

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Committee Members

Cindi Katz

Lucia Trimbur

Subject Categories

Human Geography | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Sociology

Keywords

carceral geographies, immigration imprisonmnet, labor studies, racial capitalism

Abstract

This study is a contemporary history of local jails in New Jersey that were contracted for federal immigration imprisonment. It is loosely situated during a forty-year period from 1980 to 2020. The bulk of the research on federal immigration imprisonment primarily covers privatized and federal facilities often located along the U.S. southern border and in the aftermath of 9/11. However, local county and sheriff’s jails, though often overlooked, are key to the reigniting of immigration detention in the 1980s in New Jersey and to the development of today’s immigration imprisonment regime. While these local–federal jailing assemblages and the role of local jurisdictions in immigration imprisonment have much earlier precedents, today’s system emerges as distinctly different from earlier forms of exclusion in American history. My research contributes to the bodies of literature that aim to periodize today’s immigration detention system and the longue durée of the United States as an ongoing military settler-colonial, racial-capitalist state. Immigration detention today represents key temporal tectonic shifts that renewed the state’s technologies of exclusion and thereby preserved perpetually lasting state violence and systems of oppression. From an abolitionist perspective—which is pragmatic vision for change—understanding these renewed forms of exclusion is important, precisely to challenge them.

Download

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Thursday, September 30, 2027

Share

COinS