Across the border and into the cold: hieleras and the punishment of asylum-seeking Central American women in the United States

Abstract

Thousands of Central American families are fleeing from violence in their own countries and seeking protection in the US. However, once they enter the country they are immediately confined in temporary holding cells – also called hieleras (iceboxes) due to their extremely low temperatures, where they undergo violence and neglect. The hieleras become the site where the categories of the asylum-seeker, the immigrant, and the criminal become conflated. Asylum-seekers entering the country also enter an already existing racialized structure where Latina/o subjects have been criminalized. This article analyzes the hieleras through a Foucauldian and a transnational feminist lens, and argues that these holding cells work as a site for punishing border crossers and deterring them (and others like them) from pursuing the asylum process; which are displays of both sovereign power and disciplinary power.

Keywords:

• Punishment
• asylum
• deterrence
• hielera
• feminism
• Foucault

Acknowledgments:

The author sincerely thanks Inés Valdez, Mytheli Sreenivas, Haley Swenson, Jon Branfman, Lauren Strand, Eleanor Paynter, Lynn Itagaki, Nancy Ettlinger, Krista Benson, Mat Coleman, Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros, Ian Philabaum, Alex Manning, Katie Sheperd, Ana Camila Colón-Villafañe, and Néstor Allende Asparó for their feedback and support. This paper was presented in the Race, Place, and Capital workshop that took place at The Ohio State University on 18 and 19 November 2016.

Notes

1. I understand punishment to be the set of physical and/or psychological penalties imposed on an individual while she is confined. For a phenomenal study on punishment as a social institution, see Garland (1990).

2. Many of these asylum-seeking women live in constant fear of being found by gang members from their countries of origin.

3. Some individuals have been held for more than 13 days (Americans for Immigrant Justice 2013; Bale 2013).

4. According to the CBP Security Policy and Procedures Handbook these cells are rectangular rooms with concrete floors, no beds, one toilet for every 15 people, preferably with no windows (U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2009, 492–507).

5. In this piece, when I mention families I refer to mothers and their children. The ‘family immigration detention centers’ hold only mothers and their children, never fathers.

6. For an excellent analysis of how US foreign policy has shaped these migrations and how Canada and Mexico have shaped the regional response to the refugee crisis see Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada by María Cristina García (2006).

7. Under US policy, refugees are individuals who apply for refugee status before entering the country, while asylum-seekers are those who apply for refugee status after entering the country (Mountz et al. 2002, 341).

8. There are three family immigration detention centers in the US: Berks Family Residential Center in Berks County, Pennsylvania; Karnes Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas; and South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. For an excellent account of family detention history in the US see Martin (2012b).

9. Human geographers have questioned whether Foucault’s notion of the prison as a constantly surveilled space actually applies to modern prisons (Alford 2000; Gordon 2002; Norris 2003; Simon 2004). However, my interest here lies not so much in the architectural dimension of the panopticon but rather in the function of punishment practices and their relation to each of Foucault’s two modes of power: the sovereign versus the disciplinary.

10. Foucault addresses racism in his later work Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France in 1975–1976. See also Cisneros (2016).

11. As of March 26, 2016, noncitizens represented 22.5 percent of the federal prison population (U.S. Department of Justice 2016). Latinos are the fastest-growing population in the prison system today (Morin 2010).

12. For a detailed genealogy of the entrenchment of immigration and criminal law, see for e.g. Hernández and Cuauhtémoc 2015;. For a detailed account of how the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act, which was part of IIRIRA, contributed to the rise in the detention and deportation of immigrants through the program 287(g) and the broadening of the definition of ‘aggravated felony’, see Simes and Waters (2014), Coleman (2007, 2012).

13. US national narratives construct women of color as a cultural, social, political, and economic threat to the nation: immigrants as an external threat, and black women as an internal one.

14. For a complete analysis on the racialization of Latinos in the US see Massey (2015).

15. What Lipsky (1983) called ‘street-bureaucrats’ or Hall (2012) refers to as ‘proxy sovereigns’.

16. ‘Young children must remain with their mothers’ (U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2009, 493).

17. Last renewed in 2012 (Argueta 2016, 2).

18. ‘The use of immigration detention as a deterrent, in which one person is punished in order to send a message to another person or people to discourage future migration, is illegal under international and domestic law’ (Detention Watch Network 2015). Also, in June 2014 a federal court ‘blocked DHS from detaining asylum-seeking mothers and children in order to deter other Central Americans fleeing violence from coming to the United States’ (American Immigration Council 2015).