Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants

by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández New Press 12/3/2019, hardcover SKU: 9781620974209   A leading scholar's powerful, in-depth look at the imprisonment of immigrants addressing the intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system For most of America's history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. As a result, almost 400,000 people annually now spend some time locked up pending the result of a civil or criminal immigration proceeding. In Migrating to Prison, leading scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández takes a hard look at the immigration prison system's origins, how it currently operates, and why. He tackles the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s, with enforcement resources deployed disproportionately against Latinos, and he looks at both the outsized presence of private