The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay has long been synonymous with torture, secrecy, and the abuse of executive power. It has come to epitomize lawlessness and has sparked protracted legal ...battles and political debate. For too long, however, Guantanamo has been viewed in isolation and has overshadowed a larger, interconnected global detention system that includes other military prisons such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, secret CIA jails, and the transfer of prisoners to other countries for torture. Guantanamo is simply - and alarmingly - the most visible example of a much larger prison system designed to operate outside the law.Habeas Corpus after 9/11 examines the rise of the U.S.-run global detention system that emerged after 9/11 and the efforts to challenge it through habeas corpus (a petition to appear in court to claim unlawful imprisonment). Habeas expert and litigator Jonathan Hafetz gives us an insider's view of the detention of enemy combatants and an accessible explanation of the complex forces that keep these systems running. In the age of terrorism, some argue that habeas corpus is impractical and unwise. Hafetz advocates that it remains the single most important check against arbitrary and unlawful detention, torture, and the abuse of executive power.
In this bold book, A. Naomi Paik grapples with the history of U.S. prison camps that have confined people outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Removed from the social and political ...communities that would guarantee fundamental legal protections, these detainees are effectively rightless, stripped of the right even to have rights. Rightless people thus expose an essential paradox: while the United States purports to champion inalienable rights at home and internationally, it has built its global power in part by creating a regime of imprisonment that places certain populations perceived as threats beyond rights. The United States' status as the guardian of rights coincides with, indeed depends on, its creation of rightlessness.Yet rightless people are not silent. Drawing from an expansive testimonial archive of legal proceedings, truth commission records, poetry, and experimental video, Paik shows how rightless people use their imprisonment to protest U.S. state violence. She examines demands for redress by Japanese Americans interned during World War II, testimonies of HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantanamo in the early 1990s, and appeals by Guantanamo's enemy combatants from the War on Terror. In doing so, she reveals a powerful ongoing contest over the nature and meaning of the law, over civil liberties and global human rights, and over the power of the state in people's lives.
The immigration station at New York's Ellis Island opened in 1892 and remained the largest U.S. port for immigrant entry until World War I. In popular memory, Ellis Island is typically seen as a ...gateway for Europeans seeking to join the "great American melting pot." But as this fresh examination of Ellis Island's history reveals, it was also a major site of immigrant detention and exclusion, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian travelers and maritime laborers who reached New York City from Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and even within the United States. And from 1924 to 1954, the station functioned as a detention camp and deportation center for a range of people deemed undesirable. Anna Pegler-Gordon draws on immigrants' oral histories and memoirs, government archives, newspapers, and other sources to reorient the history of migration and exclusion in the United States. In chronicling the circumstances of those who passed through or were detained at Ellis Island, she shows that Asian exclusion was both larger in scope and more limited in force than has been previously recognized.
The liberal legal ideal of protection of the individual against administrative detention without trial is embodied in the habeas corpus tradition. However, the use of detention to control immigration ...has gone from a wartime exception to normal practice, thus calling into question modern states' adherence to the rule of law. Daniel Wilsher traces how modern states have come to use long-term detention of immigrants without judicial control. He examines the wider emerging international human rights challenge presented by detention based upon protecting 'national sovereignty' in an age of global migration. He explores the vulnerable political status of immigrants and shows how attempts to close liberal societies can create 'unwanted persons' who are denied fundamental rights. To conclude, he proposes a set of standards to ensure that efforts to control migration, including the use of detention, conform to principles of law and uphold basic rights regardless of immigration status.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This book examines what happens when states and other authorities use detention to abuse their power, deter dissent and maintain social ...hierarchies. Written by an author with decades of practical experience in the human rights field, the book examines a variety of scenarios where individuals are unlawfully detained in violation of their most basic rights to personal liberty and exposes the many fallacies associated with arbitrary detention. Proposing solutions for future policy to scrutinise processes, this is a call for greater respect for the rule of law and human rights.
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 US 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 US 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 takes
on new urgency.
The experience of border crossing for refugees and irregular migrants challenges global border and migration controls in multiple contexts. Using qualitative field research in Tanzania, Spain, ...Morocco and Australia, Heather L. Johnson asks how a global regime of migration management and control can be perceived through the dynamics of particular border spaces: refugee camps, border zones and detention centres. She explores how irregular migrants are impacted by the increasingly security-oriented practices of border control, and how they confront these practices. Johnson rejects the characterization of border spaces as exceptional, abject and exclusionary, arguing instead for an understanding of politics as everyday contestation that reveals a radical political agency, re-imagining the global non-citizen as a transgressive and powerful figure. Building on recent scholarship that rethinks irregularity and non-citizenship, her conclusions have broad implications for how we understand irregular migration from a position of dialogue and solidarity.
This book analyses torture, inhuman and degrading treatment towards migrants worldwide, integrating overviews from several contexts and disciplines. It highlights that today migrants’ mistreatment is ...a global phenomenon, a frequent element of the migratory experience (in countries of departure, of transit, of arrival), an intrinsic component of state policies, and an extreme form of that structural violence which is inherent to the contemporary war on migrants at the global level.
