Files
Abstract
This dissertation argues that state violence is made more intractable and pervasive when it is intertwined with discourses of humanitarianism and care. Specifically, I develop and examine the concept of humanitarian detention in US family detention. I argue that humanitarian detention results in the expanse, entrenchment, and perpetuation of detention power, and that this form of power allows the US immigration enforcement regime to focus on conditions and standards of confinement, rather than reconsidering confinement itself. My analysis stems from long-term participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and extensive legal and document analysis of the South Texas Family Residential Center (STFRC), a family detention center located in Dilley, Texas. The STFRC is a product of discourses of care in humanitarianism melding with the militarization of the border and the criminalization of migration. Thus, it is the underlying claim of the dissertation that immigrant detention, especially family detention, can only be understood fully by taking into consideration how the discourses of humanitarian detention function and proliferate. I examine the Credible Fear Interview, to demonstrate that this interview process is a site of legal sorting through which the legal categories of the “valid asylum seeker”, and its supposed opposite, the “illegal immigrant”, are socially (re)produced. I analyze litigation over the Flores Settlement Agreement, and family separation policy, to show how the concept of family detention as humanitarian detention was developed by federal administrations in the context of litigation challenging the US government’s stated goal of family detention. Overall, the dissertation argues that humanitarian detention is a feature of the current family detention system. Humanitarian detention not only shapes the South Texas family residential center, these discourses are part of the strategy of governance of US immigration enforcement and make possible the expansion of prisons for immigrants, normalize the imprisonment of other populations, and foreclose the possibility of reducing and abolishing the detention of humans. The interplay of humanitarianism with detention policy enables a particularly potent state power to detain and deport, under the imaginary of humanitarian detention.