The early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of
modern mass incarceration in the United States. The Mariel Cuban
migration of 1980, alongside increasing arrivals of Haitian and
Central American asylum-seekers, galvanized new modes of covert
warfare in the Reagan administration's globalized War on Drugs. Using
newly available government documents, Shull demonstrates how migrant
detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency at the
intersections of U.S. war-making and domestic carceral trends. As the
Reagan administration developed retaliatory enforcement measures to
target a racialized specter of mass migration, it laid the
foundations of new forms of carceral and imperial expansion.
Reagan's
war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on
critical refugee studies, community archives, protest artifacts, and
oral histories, Detention Empire also shows how migrants
resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and
allies on the outside--including legal advocates, Jesse Jackson's
Rainbow Coalition, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary
movements--organized hunger strikes, caravans, and prison uprisings
to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to
U.S. empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its
borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis,
reckoning with these histories take on new urgency.