Jennifer M. Chacón

Immigration Detention: No Turning Back?

Over the past two decades, the US government has expanded immigration detention to unprecedented levels. This essay explores the social and doctrinal origins of the immigration detention boom and provides a critique of the legal doctrines that continue to insulate immigration detention from the legal scrutiny generally applied to comparable deprivations of liberty in the context of criminal punishment. The article also evaluates recent immigration detention reform efforts and their limitations, assessing the potential impact of current immigration reform proposals on immigration detention. Notwithstanding the apparent trend in favor of immigration reform, viable reform proposals continue to assume the need for punitive detention for migrants as part of a criminalized immigration enforcement model. In this context, truly comprehensive reform of immigration detention practices in the United States remains a distant goal.

Deferred action and the discretionary state: migration, precarity and resistance *

Abstract In the United States, the lives of undocumented people have become increasingly precarious due to increased surveillance, enforcement, criminalization, and detention. In this context, deferred action, a form of prosecutorial discretion in which the government declines to pursue removal and provides temporary work authorization, has become a source of both hope and vulnerability. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and legal analysis, we delineate the forms of partial inclusion experienced by deferred action recipients and explore the position from which they can make claims on the US state. Our analysis advances citizenship theory by detailing the relationship between the discretionary state and its transitory, noncitizen subjects, as well as how this relationship is complicated by resistance from youth activists and their allies. The liminal legality afforded by deferred action provides partial but insecure relief from the precarity experienced by the undocumented.