Bare life in an immigration jail: technologies of surveillance in U.S. pre-deportation detention

ABSTRACT

Migration policies globally are characterised by a growth in the use of detention. These dynamics have also been noted in the United States of America, where, increasingly, the private immigration detention infrastructure is the most developed in the world. Like other total institutions, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities depend on controlling human bodies. This article, which explains how nation-state sovereignty is created by means of surveillance technologies, draws upon the narratives of 26 Mexicans, deported under the administrations of Presidents Bush and Obama and interviewed in four waves of research between 2012 and 2019 in their hometown. The article describes the lived experience of biopolitical interventions on detainees’ bodies and explains the disciplining role of restricting or limiting access to ICTs. The article uses Agamben’s notion of bare life. It describes how biopolitical interventions and disciplines dehumanise precarious migrants and contribute to their governmentality long after their deportation when they abstain from re-entering the United States. The article complicates the notion of bare life by demonstrating that the use of biometrics (fingerprints) not only dehumanises people but also identifies their bodies and thus rehumanise them.

KEYWORDS:

• Bare life
• biopolitics
• deportation
• disciplines
• immigration detention
• sovereignty

Acknowledgements

This article would not have been possible without the women and men from ‘San Ángel’ whom I cannot mention by name as I wish to protect their safety. I am indebted to Federico Besserer from Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, my supervisor during the first part of my research in Mexico in 2012. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume for expressing their interest in my study and their feedback on the first version of the manuscript. I am indebted to Jason De León and his graduate students (back then) from the University of Michigan, Oto Alves da Silva and John Doering-White, for their insightful comments, as well as to Aleksandra Galasińska and William Pawlett from the University of Wolverhampton for their helpful remarks. Finally, I am grateful to Wojciech Wółkowski for drawing up the map in Figure 1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Funding

This research was supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico (the 2012 edition of the Mexican Government Scholarship for Foreign Researchers), the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw under three DSM research grant numbers [105200/18, 107700/13, 110400/62], and the Kosciuszko Foundation (2017–2018 Academic Year Fellowship for advanced study, research or teaching at universities and other institutions of higher learning in the United States).