The United States has the most extensive immigration detention system in the world, expanding from a capacity of less than 5,000 detainees per day in the 1980s to 52,000 by 2019. While the most vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric may be attributed to Republicans, US detention infrastructure has grown exponentially regardless of the political party in power as reports of abysmal detention conditions pile up.

Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon provide a damning exposé of the ways immigration detention generates income. At the same time, those detained are starved, sickened, and exploited as a matter of routine detention operations. Drawing on over a decade of research focusing on detention centers in New Jersey and New York, the authors map public-private financial relationships and trace how detention contracts for food, medical care, and in-facility stores are fought over to the penny. By dissecting the inner workings of immigration detention, they show a system governed by a capitalist logic that produces sickening and corrupting dependencies in communities across the US.

Coming at a pivotal social and political moment, Immigration Detention Inc. makes the case for dismantling immigration detention regimes everywhere.

Nancy Hiemstra is a political geographer whose research focuses on US immigration enforcement policies. She is the author of Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime and co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention. She is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, US.

Deirdre Conlon is a critical geographer working in the US and Britain. Her work focuses on how immigration and border controls are proliferating as they are monetized. She is co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention and Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention. She is Associate Professor based at the University of Leeds.

Setareh Ghandehari is the Advocacy Director for the Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States. She works alongside other DWN staff and members to abolish immigration detention in the United States, and has been involved in social justice movements for over 20 years.

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