Outsourcing Migrant Control: 100 Years of Privatized Prisons

Even before the Mexican Revolution, federal authorities started hiring local hotels and prison authorities to hold people they designated as strangers to American law.  Ethnic Studies scholar and sociologist David Hernandez has been tracing the transformation of an overlapping carceral state meant to keep migrants out of the realms of due process and civil rights.  With the recent intensification of physical outsourcing of kids, families and people in the Trump regime, Dr. Hernandez’ work on this process in the 80s, 90s and this millennia speaks to the difficulties in dis-embedding this desire to expel and contain migrant others from American political culture.

David Hernández is Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on immigration enforcement, in particular, the U.S. detention regime. He is completing a book manuscript on this institution, titled "Alien Incarcerations: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship," and he is also the co-editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press 2016). His work has appeared journals such as Border-Lines, Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, Journal of Race and Policy, Latina/o Studies, and NACLA: Report on the Americas.