November 5, 2020 33
The Lie of American Asylum
Francisco Cantú
Migrating to Prison:
America’s Obsession with
Locking Up Immigrants
by César Cuauhtémoc
García Hernández.
New Press, 190 pp., $24.99
The Dispossessed:
A Story of Asylum at the
US-Mexico Border and Beyond
by John Washington.
Verso, 334 pp., $26.95
The Book of Rosy:
A Mother’s Story of Separation
at the Border
by Rosayra Pablo Cruz
and Julie Schwietert Collazo.
HarperOne, 248 pp., $26.99
At the beginning of August, as corona-
virus cases continued to spike across
the country, I interviewed a Mexican
asylum seeker as part of a project to
archive the voices of migrants who
have suffered under the US detention
system. The man, who asked to be re-
ferred to as Enrique to safeguard his
identity, had just been released after
eight months inside the La Palma Cor-
rectional Center, a private for-profit
detention center in Arizona under
contract with US Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), where
he endured verbal abuse from racist
guards, was given insufficient and often
spoiled food, and eventually became
infected, along with countless others,
with Covid-19. When Enrique first
began to exhibit symptoms, he pleaded
with guards and in-house medical staff
to be tested, only to be denied and dis-
missed for weeks.
More than a month later his condi-
tion deteriorated so severely that med-
ical staff were forced to transfer him to
a nearby hospital. It was there that En-
rique finally received confirmation that
he had been suffering from the corona-
virus all along. The nurses, after com-
pleting a scan of his chest, also informed
him that they had spotted several can-
cerous growths in his lungs, tumors that
would soon offer him a grim ticket to
freedom, finally providing irrefutable
grounds for the medical parole that had
previously been denied to him.
“I arrived at the border, at the front
door of this country,” Enrique told
me. “I knocked on the door. I said
to an officer, ‘I’m here to ask for asy-
lum. Will you help me?’” Instead of
receiving protection, Enrique found
himself driven to the edge of death.
As shocking as his story is, the current
brutality of American immigration en-
forcement is perhaps best encapsulated
by something Enrique witnessed while
in detention before the outbreak of the
virus: one day, while in the yard with
his fellow detainees, Enrique watched
a man climb to the top of the fence sur-
rounding the facility and hang himself
with the barbed coils of concertina
wire. When guards arrived, they beat
the man’s bloodied body, sprayed him
with pepper spray, and took him away.
Enrique and the others never found
out what became of the man, but his
act was part of an emerging pattern—
reports continue to leak out from La
Palma of men hanging themselves,
slitting their wrists, swallowing razor
blades. For months on end, detainees
have organized hunger strikes, sent out
letters en masse, and engaged in count-
less acts of desperation and resistance,
all with the hope of drawing attention
to a system that has for decades been
rooted in dehumanization and the
deadly fiction of deterrence.
A handful of new books examine
America’s punitive immigration poli-
tics from different angles, each offer-
ing its own wrenching portrait of the
Trump era. The books also touch on
the greatest outrage of his administra-tion: the policy-sanctioned separation
of families that began in the summer of- Despite the months of backpedal-
ing and equivocation that followed the
rollout of the policy, a recent investiga-
tion has revealed the extent to which
it was carefully directed, with then
attorney general Jeff Sessions bluntly
announcing to a group of prosecutors,
“We need to take away children.” Pub-
lic awareness of the separations still
centers around images of children wail-
ing at the feet of armed agents and kids
sleeping in chain-link cages at the bor-
der, but in Migrating to Prison César
Cuauhtémoc García Hernández shows
that the machinery of separation has
long stretched deep into the interior,
consisting of a vast network of immi-
grant detention centers that now reach
almost every state in the nation.
The internment of migrants is often
relegated to a political no-man’s-land,
slipping through the cracks that sep-
arate discussions of immigration and
criminal justice. But in Migrating to
Prison we learn that, at the federal
level, more people are imprisoned in
the United States for immigration vi-
olations than for any other charges.
While the US has long been notorious
for having the largest prison popula-
tion in the world, it also possesses the
world’s largest immigrant detention
system, locking away more than half a
million people annually. Incarceration
has escalated at staggering rates, with
Obama’s previous record of detain-
ing more than 34,000 migrants on any
given day quickly surpassed by Trump,
whose average by 2018 had already
grown to more than 42,000. Increas-
ingly, people like Enrique who come
to our front door seeking safe passage
into a “nation of immigrants” are being
ushered, instead, into prison.In tracing the history behind today’s
record levels of imprisonment, García
Hernández reveals the haphazard ways
immigration enforcement has been
devised and administered, how su-
premacist notions of nationalism and
race have long guided our policymak-
ing, and how adherence to procedural
guidelines was gradually reframed as a
question of criminality.For García Hernández, a professor
of law at the University of Denver and a
practicing immigration lawyer, the issue
is personal. The grandson of migrant
farmworkers who came to the US under
the Bracero Program for guest workers
in the 1950s, he was raised in the Rio
Grande Valley—long a proving ground
for America’s most relentless border
enforcement practices. Despite grow-
ing up in a region of perceived lawless-
ness, it wasn’t until he arrived at Brown
University as an undergraduate that he
became truly acquainted with criminal
behavior: “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.” García Hernández soon
learned that campus cops had little in-
terest in saddling students with charges
of identity theft or federal drug crimes.
He quickly understood that America’s
elite colleges, as spaces dominated by
wealthy white people, would always be
free from the stigma of criminality that
hung over the overwhelmingly poor,
overwhelmingly brown corner of South
Texas he called home.
America’s immigration politics have
long been defined by exclusion, but
García Hernández reminds us that “for
most of the nation’s history, we did not
lock up so many people for the act of
migration.” This all began to change
in the aftermath of the war on drugs,
launched in the 1970s, which effectively
thwarted many of the rights won during
the civil rights movement by reorienting
racist anxieties around notions of crime,
ushering in what Michelle Alexander
later called “the new Jim Crow” of massincarceration. “Much like inner- city
black men,” García Hernández writes,
“migrants were depicted as depraved
purveyors of death and moral decay, es-
pecially those from south of the border.”
Imprisoning migrants in greater
numbers soon became a way not only
to treat newcomers as outcasts but to
mark them in the public imagination
as a threat to traditional notions of
American life. Semantically, however,
government institutions worked hard
to ensure that the word “prison” was
never attached to the growing network
of “detention,” “processing,” and “res-
idential” centers. Even today, courts
and judges continue to assert that,
in legal terms, these aren’t places for
punishment but administrative wait-
ing rooms that provide the government
with time to decide “where on the map
people should stand.”
In The Dispossessed the immigra-
tion reporter, translator, and activist
John Washington explores how these
same enforcement policies and legal
maneuvers made possible a gutting of
asylum and refugee protections. Wash-
ington reaches all the way to the begin-
ning of Western history to trace how
the concept of asylum evolved across
millennia, drawing on the work of phi-
losophers, poets, politicians, and other
thinkers to illuminate how notions
of refuge have been part of the very
foundation of organized human soci-
ety. Providing places of sanctuary was
deemed so important by the ancients
that, as Moses organized the king-
dom of Israel, he was commanded by
God to establish six “cities of refuge”
where those fleeing blood vengeance
could find safety. These Levitical cities
extended protection far outside their
walls, ensuring that the roads leading
to them offered safe and convenient
travel, with signs proclaiming “Refuge,
Refuge” and promising legal represen-
tation for every fleeing asylum seeker.
“It’s hard to imagine a more antipodal
stance from today’s refugee policy,”
Wash i ngton obser ves.
The word asylum stems from the
ancient Greek term a-sylan, denoting
a place free from pillaging and piracy.
During the Hellenistic period, these
sanctuaries from marauding and per-
secution were respected with fearsome
regard—to violate their established
protections was to invite scourge and
plague. Defining the boundaries of
these spaces also laid the groundwork
for what were, in effect, some of the
first political borders, helping to estab-
lish early notions of the nation-state
and the types of control it might exer-
cise over certain areas. “This is one of
the inherent paradoxes of asylum and
refugee principles,” Washington notes:
“that the delimiting of protection
from a state reinscribed the need for a
state, even if it was a different one, to
offer that very protection.” But today,
he points out, it is the state itself that
has evolved into “the ultimate pirate”
against whom most refugees end up
seeking protection.
In addition to its broad historical
view, The Dispossessed offers what is
perhaps the most complete narrative
account of modern-day asylum and
the politics of refusal that have comeA migrant child looking through the US-Mexico border fence, Tijuana, November 2018JohnMoore/GettyImages