Abstract
Examining immigrant detention and forced disappearance through their effects on family and social networkds reveals the pernicious power of state removals.
“Prisons do not disappear problems. They disappear human beings.” As Angela Y. Davis, the preeminent scholar and prison abolitionist, has long argued, prisons do not resolve the numerous social problems that lead to incarceration. In many ways, spaces of detention and incarceration actually mirror other forms of social marginalization, such as enforced disappearance, that punitively and sometimes indefinitely, remove people from social and political life. In this essay, we consider two important forms of detention—immigrant detention and forced disappearance—to trace their effects on the families and loved ones left behind.
In the United States and around the world, a range of institutions are responsible for the arbitration of freedom and imbued with increasing political power. Jails and prisons, of which a growing minority are now privatized, account for the largest network of incarceration. In the United States, this amounted to over 2.3 million people in 2016—nearly a quarter of the world’s imprisoned population. The privatization of detention has inaugurated new forms of mass detention. The Global Detention Project documents thousands of active detention facilities, on every continent, which imprison millions of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. In other instances, the scope of detention remains unquantifiable: hundreds of states forcibly disappear political dissidents into facilities and never formally acknowledge their detentions.
Alongside this vast network of individuals denied their liberty and removed to remote locations, those left behind—the families—represent a multiplication of these institutions’ effects. The implications for social life are profound. Family members often become the only connections to the incarcerated and the detained, closely observing both the power of the state and its limits. Through their interactions with prisons and detention centers, families experience a circumscription of their own freedom, too—what law and family scholar Megan Comfort refers to as “secondary prisonization.” At the same time, families renegotiate a sense of freedom for their detained relatives, for whom phone calls and visits recreate a sense of what it means to be on the outside. These intimate encounters with state institutions frequently culminate in collective action undertaken by families against arbitrary and unjust forms of state violence.
Limits of Freedom
Around the world, immigrant detention and forced disappearance are important modes of social control and state violence. They have largely been overshadowed by discussions of mass incarceration despite their significant parallels with prisons and privatization. In the United States, immigrant detention centers are marked by their contradictory nature. Legally, they serve as administrative holding sites for immigrants awaiting their hearings in immigration court. Practically, they serve as prisons for immigrants who are unable to leave and are under constant surveillance by detention officers and cameras. The lives of immigrants inside detention centers are highly routinized, from the uniforms that they must wear to the strict rules surrounding food, and share many similarities to that of prison life for prisoners. Families of immigrant detainees are also subject to the limits of freedom imposed by immigrant detention centers through surveillance inside detention during visitations and the alteration of everyday life beyond detention.
Visiting detention centers is one way that families attempt to maintain contact with their detained relative. Yet, there are many obstacles to confront when visiting a relative in detention. For instance, in the United States, the detention center where a family member is being held may not be close enough to visit. Immigrant detainees are not assigned a detention center based on jurisdiction, as is the case in the criminal legal system. Instead, because detention is not regarded as a punishment and immigration court a criminal adjudication, immigrants are distributed throughout the country as they are detained. As a result, it is possible to live in Texas but have a relative detained in Pennsylvania. In such long-distance cases, regular visits are frequently unsustainable or even impossible.
When visitation is possible, families contend with other difficulties. Upon visiting a detention center, families must abide by strict rules including dress codes and general codes of conduct. Similar to prison visitations, in detention visits the clothing of visitors, specifically women, is sometimes sanctioned to prevent admission into detention centers. For example, while detention centers do not have an explicit policy on the type of shoes that visitors are allowed to wear, women are frequently prevented from entering the visitation room unless they wear closed-toed shoes or socks to cover their feet. This presents difficulties for first-time visitors, who are unaware of the policies (often because they are not disclosed or regularly enforced). Other policies ban the possession of a cell phone, paper and pencil, and money not in the form of change, which prohibits families from establishing regular contact and providing financial support to their relatives. Families cannot, for instance, write down pertinent information like their relatives’ assigned “Alien Number,” which is required in order to keep track of a detained immigrant via the Online Detainee Locator System operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The prohibition on cell phones and other electronics inside the detention center prevents families from sharing photos and offering their relatives a glimpse of life outside detention—a prime objective of visiting relatives in detention.
Beyond the formal control that detention centers impose on families upon entering its walls is the impact that the detention system as a whole has on families throughout the process. Confronting the detention of a relative is not confined to the moments of visitation—for families who live close and feel secure enough to visit—but rather, are carried out in other aspects of their lives. This can be observed in how immigrant families’ lives become focused around their relative’s detention. For some families, their lives revolve around the various events associated with detention, including seeing lawyers, planning visitations, and communicating via phone. Yet, there are opportunity costs associated with families dedicating time to their relatives and the detention system. For instance, families regularly report missing out on attending college courses, social events, and important school functions for their children in order to focus on addressing the detention system.
The effects of detention endured by families of the detained are particularly acute in the case of forced disappearance. While the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) attempts to document state-enforced disappearances worldwide, the scope of this form of state violence remains largely unknown. Disappearance is clandestine. In contrast to mass incarceration or immigrant detention, forced disappearance is defined by the abduction of an individual from his or her home, workplace, or other location to an undisclosed facility by state or state-affiliated personnel. Accordingly, disappearance is characterized by consistent state denials of information regarding the details of the disappeared person’s whereabouts. Families of the disappeared experience a unique and cruel form of distress compared to the context of incarceration or immigrant detention.
When states in Central America and the Southern Cone institutionalized disappearance to police political dissidence, such as opposition to a political party or regime, it brought international attention to cases of forced disappearance. Popularized by the Guatemalan media, “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared” became a way to refer to the thousands of individuals, primarily men, who were abducted by the state and, often, never officially charged with a crime. As a form of state violence, disappearance not only constrains the freedom of the individual who is disappeared and removed from society, but is intended to impact those left behind, including families, friends, neighbors, and the broader public. Disappearance as a tool to police dissidence functions to disappear both the individual from public space and also to make invisible political and social views that run counter to the state.
The absence produced by disappearance imparts significant effects on families. Disappearance is often concentrated in particular neighborhoods of a city or regions of a state, and it instills fear among those left behind—the uncertainty regarding the whereabouts of the disappeared, the suspicion of friends and neighbors who might be state informants, and the concern of being disappeared themselves. The stigma of the disappeared person extends onto their families, who come under suspicion from authorities. This stigma makes families possible victims of state violence and can make them social pariahs, as others seek to avoid drawing suspicion to themselves. In some cases, male family members have been forcibly taken before and following their relative’s disappearance as a warning: your families are being watched by the state.
Thus, as we see with immigrant detention, people’s lives are reoriented around disappearance. For some families, this means conforming daily rituals around the comings and goings of local authorities with whom they inquire about news of their relatives’ whereabouts. For others, the absence created by disappearance demands that families recreate a sense of the disappeared relative in the weeks, months, and years following a disappearance—siblings name their children after their disappeared brothers and mothers prepare extra sweets on holidays in case a disappeared relative just happens to return. In this way, disappearance becomes a type of psychic imprisonment that is unrelenting and distinct compared to other forms of detention. As Foucault intimates in the 1977 study Discipline and Punish, “a sort of general recipe for the exercise of power over men [is] the ‘mind’ as a surface of inscription for power.” Confining families to the memory of their loved one leaves them in a protracted and unresolved state of mourning. The sense of closure made possible by the rituals like formal burial remains elusive. The disappearance comes to define family life along a continuum of the past, present, and future.
As forms of state power, detention and disappearance effectively police criminality, migration, and political dissidence. The power to disappear, especially, renders certain populations disposable from public space, a process that suppresses dramatic public outcry. At the same time, the memories of imprisoned, detained, and disappeared men and women remain significant to the extensive networks of family members left outside the walls of detention. As Avery Gordon puts it in Ghostly Matters, disappearance is a sort of “haunting.”
Everyday Family Politics
Family entanglements with detention centers and disappearance are largely invisible to the public. Family commitments to their detained and disappeared relatives is rendered visible when family members engage in political activism and resistance, both formal and informal. Given the gendered and racialized patterns of detention and disappearance, particularly in the United States, men of color are more likely to be detained. Consequently, it is often women family members—sisters, mothers, daughters—who engage directly with systems of detention. In terms of the everyday, visitation to detention centers, which can circumscribe freedom for immigrant families who visit their relatives, also serves as a form of activism for some families against the isolation that is created by detention. Families outside of detention understand that their visitation helps detained immigrants navigate and cope with the detention process and through their activity within the space of detention, families facilitate freedom for their relatives. Unable to bring any items from outside the detention center in, family members will, for instance, bring quarters to buy a soda or candy from the vending machines inside the visitation room. Sharing a small treat over comforting conversation provides some hope for detained immigrants and reminds them that they may one day be at home with family.
Families also support their relatives in detention by depositing funds into accounts so they are able to make purchases inside the detention commissary. The detention commissary, filled with overpriced and processed foods, is an avenue for families to provide supplemental resources for their relatives. Immigrant detainees often cite the lack of quality food and having enough food to eat as primary concerns of detention. Reports from former detainees have indicated that the food in detention centers is regularly cold, disgusting, or just inedible. In the worst cases, detainees report finding hair, objects, and worms in their food. In others, the food given is not sufficient to nourish them, with only two or three meals served at long intervals each day. Hence, the commissary presents one way by which families can ameliorate the conditions of detention.
Family activism can also include formal modes like joining and leading local immigrant rights organizations. One prominent form of family activism includes continued visits to detention centers, even after their own relative has been released. Through immigrant rights organizations, for instance, family members and other volunteers take the time and make the effort to meet with detainees who may not have local support from their own families. Through visitation programs, families of the formerly detained provide many of the same emotional and social systems of support they once provided for their own detained relatives. Additionally, they expand the networks of current detainees by sharing information on pro bono lawyers, the detention process from a macro-level perspective, and the day-to-day workings of the entire process.
Formal family-based political activism in the arena of immigrant detention, which Amalia Pallares calls “family activism,” has grown in the last ten years. Immigrants of varying legal statuses increasingly articulate their grievances against the immigration system in terms of family. Activists argue that draconian immigration policies—detention specifically—interfere with both citizens’ and non-citizens’ fundamental rights to maintain and contribute to a family. From this perspective, exclusionary immigration policies go beyond the question of legal migration; on a broader level, these policies are shown to inhibit family unity, parenting, and caregiving across family members with mixed legal statuses. This approach is similar to those undertaken by other social justice advocates, such as Mothers Against Police Brutality (MAPB), which argues that police violence against African American and Latino men disproportionately impacts families and women’s abilities to mother their children.
Family-based activism in response to forced disappearance has a long history. One of the largest and most well known family-based social movements was led by mothers of disappeared men and women in Argentina during the 1970s. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo, or the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, became a social movement organization led by women who sought answers concerning the whereabouts of their children. Donning white headscarves embroidered with their children’s names, these activist mothers evaded prohibitions on organized demonstrations by walking two at a time around the plaza, which is flanked on the eastern side by the Casa Rosada, the presidential mansion. Collectively their efforts raised awareness of forced disappearance in Argentina, where over 30,000 men and women are believed to have disappeared during the period of the military dictatorship from 1976–1983.
The activism of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo is among several maternal movements, including the Saturday Mothers in Turkey, who regularly demonstrate in Istanbul with enlarged photographs of their disappeared children. In most contexts, however, a broader coalition of family members mobilizes on behalf of the disappeared. Numerous social movements around disappearance organize the entire family and elicit the participation of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, daughters and sons, alongside other extended kin. From the Committee of the Relatives of Disappeared Persons in Guatemala to the Association of the Families of the Forcibly Disappeared in Egypt, families worldwide ally together to challenge the state concerning the fate of their relatives, demand DNA testing of unidentified remains, and seek reparations for the loss of key breadwinners. In other family-based movements, parents of the disappeared organize together to commemorate and preserve the memories of their children—radical acts in political contexts that deny their existence.
Families, often overlooked as important political actors, have been and continue to be on the frontlines of activism. At the intersection of public life and detention, families possess intimate knowledge of institutions that arbitrate freedom and regularly endure their extensive effects. Standing against the power of detention centers, prisons, and disappearance, these families are politicized by state institutions in ways that can challenge the state and render visible systemic inequalities of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class.