César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández's Blog, page 5

With Biden returning to White House, private prison stock falls

As the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election began pointing toward a Biden-Harris administration, private prison companies took a financial hit. Over a few days, CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies in the United States, saw their stock prices drop substantially. Both companies had benefited from the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.

In just a few days, though, investors seem to have grown concerned about the future of the private prison ...

New York Review of Books

Two weeks before a referendum on the extraordinary presidency of Donald J. Trump, it’s easy to imagine that everything that the U.S. government has done under his watch has been new and innovative in its destructiveness. But “in Migrating to Prison César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández shows that the machinery of separation has long stretched deep into the interior, consisting of a vast network of immigrant detention centers that now reach almost every state in the nation,” Francisco Cantú writes in...

Justice Dept pushes Supreme Court to Imperil Families

By Manuel D. Vargas

Against the backdrop of an unprecedented global pandemic endangering the health and well-being of families across the nation and the world, the Supreme Court will hear argument on October 14 in Pereida v. Barr,an immigration case in which Justice Department lawyers are taking an aggressive position that, if adopted by the Court, would further imperil families with immigrant members.

The stakes in the Pereida case are high, now more than ever. The petitioner, Clemente Av...

Fund Immigrant Defense, Promote Justice

Gritty North Oakland Street in Aurora doesn’t look like the kind of place where justice meets its match. But across from the self-storage and facing a row of battered warehouses, guards parade migrants into courtrooms where judges decide if they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Whether newcomers to the United States asking for asylum or green-card holders with decades in Colorado, most will not have a lawyer walk into court with them.

Unlike the criminal justice system, immigra...

Scholar Strike – Race, Immigration, Imprisonment

I am a lawyer by training, an academic by trade, and an intellectual by calling. For years I have devoted myself to understanding and challenging immigration policing in the United States. As part of #ScholarStrike, I’m sharing a lecture I delivered in 2015 at the University of Denver linking race, immigration, and imprisonment.

May the story that I told in 2015 one day be nothing more than a nightmare from which we have awaken.

Defund Police, Limit ICE

By the time Antonio Arceo answered a call from his wife’s cell phone and heard a stranger’s voice asking if he knew Roxana García, a simple run-in with the police was plunging their family into a nightmare. The stranger was a sheriff’s deputy who had stopped García for speeding, then arrested her for not carrying a license. She spent one night at a county jail about an hour west of Chicago, then federal immigration officers took her. Soon García would be deported. What began as an ordinary run-i...

Beyond borders

Last week, I moderated Beyond Borders, a talk hosted by The Biennial of the Americas. The conversation focused on migration, the fluidity of borders, and the people who cross them.

Coffee Chat: Beyond Borders from Biennial of the Americas on Vimeo.

I was joined by Patricia Kumbakisaka, Tania Chairez, and Maria G. Aguilar Correa. Robin Swanhuyser, Program Director for the Biennial, organized it.

ICE family prison population hits lowest point in years

In the midst of the pandemic, ICE has reduced its family immigration prison population to the lowest level since at least 2016. The agency’s three prisons where parents are confined with their children collectively held 369 people, on average, in May of this year. That’s a drop of over 2,100 people per day from the Trump administration’s peak in May 2018.

Data I’ve obtained using Freedom of Information Act requests shows a steady downward trajectory for the nation’s family immigration prisons...

ICE holds migrants for longer in pandemic

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, ICE is holding migrants in its prison system for longer periods. Last month, migrants spent almost two months longer in ICE prisons than one year earlier.

By comparing ICE data on average length of stay, I’m able to consider an important feature of immigration imprisonment across multiple years. Using Freedom of Information Act requests, I’ve previously learned that in June 2018 migrants spent, on average, 36.0 days inside ICE prisons. In June 2019, they...

Dip in families detained by ICE

The Trump administration’s anti-migrant policies are well known and multifaceted. Interestingly, the government’s heavy-handed approach is showing up in fewer detained families at ICE’s “family residential centers.” Data I obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that there were substantially fewer children held alongside their parents in September 2019 than at that point one or two years earlier.

From October 2016 to September 2019 (ending on September 14, 2019), the numbe...