Migrating to Prison by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Author:César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

More than simply unjustified by safety concerns, like with other types of punishment, immigration imprisonment is dispatched in a manner that is racially biased. Twice over, actually. First, as Michelle Alexander and others have explained in great detail, the criminal justice system marks people as criminals through the well-known prisms of race and class. Poor people of color are policed, prosecuted, and punished more than are white people who engage in comparable misconduct. In the impoverished corner of South Texas in which I grew up, cops could show up at any moment. Border Patrol agents lurked outside stores downtown and drove along isolated roads near the Rio Grande. Every time I crossed the bridge back into Texas, I had to prove my right to be there and shed any suspicion that I was up to no good.

Then came college. During my first week in the Ivy League, I saw more crime than I ever had before. Marijuana came out from behind classics of English literature, and fake IDs were as common as late-night pizza. Had they wanted to, campus cops literally could have smelled their way to federal drug crimes. Once there, they probably would have found some underage drinking and identity theft. But they did not want to. As spaces that are dominated by wealthy white people, colleges are relatively privileged. City cops and campus law enforcement officers have little interest in cracking down on illegal activity perpetrated by the children of parents all too ready to use whatever influence they have to ensure that their children are able to learn who they are without the stigma of criminality attaching itself to them. That’s a luxury many people of color do not have.

Immigration law piles on top of criminal law, becoming a second layer of racially biased punishment. The mandatory-detention provision of civil immigration law that requires ICE to take certain people into custody and that prevents immigration judges from letting them free turns almost exclusively on criminal activity.36 On the criminal end of the immigration-law spectrum, migrants convicted of illegal reentry, a felony under federal law, are subject to much more prison time if they have prior convictions for certain offenses—from an eight-year bump following any felony conviction to an eighteen-year bump following an aggravated felony conviction.37

Policies promoted by both Democrats and Republicans reveal a critical reliance on the criminal justice system. Lock-step use of the criminal justice system to identify people who merit removal from the United States ignores its biases. Take, for example, the rate of imprisonment for black migrants. Often overlooked, there are roughly 3.7 million black migrants in the United States. This is about 7 percent of the total noncitizen population.38 Reflecting the racially skewed criminal justice system, black migrants are more likely to be detained by ICE for a criminal reason than are other migrants. According to an analysis of 2014 immigrationcourt data, 14 percent of all migrants detained faced removal on a criminal basis. For black migrants, that number was closer to 50 percent.

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