Immigration Detention Abolition and the Violence of Digital Cages

Abstract

The United States has a long history of pernicious immigration enforcement and surveillance. Today, in addition to more than 34,000 people held in immigration detention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) shackles and surveils an astounding 376,000 people under its “Alternatives to Detention” program. The number of people subjected to this surveillance has grown dramatically in the last two decades, from just 1,339 in 2005. ICE’s rapidly expanding Alternatives to Detention program is marked by “digital cages,” consisting of GPS-outfitted ankle shackles and invasive phone and location tracking. Government officials and some immigrant advocates have categorized these digital cages as a humane “reform,” ostensibly an effort to decrease the number of people behind bars. This article challenges that framework, illuminating how, instead of moving us closer to justice and liberation - and towards abolition - digital cages disperse the violence of immigration enforcement and surveillance more broadly, and more insidiously, ensnaring hundreds of thousands more immigrants, families, and communities.

The increasing digitization of immigration enforcement and surveillance is part of a growing, and expansive, geography of violence. This article argues that if we want to take deportation abolition seriously, we must consider the impact of this growing surveillance. Building upon deportation abolition literature situating immigration detention as a form of violence, this article posits that rather than mitigate violence, digital cages create a “violence of invisibility” that is equally, if not more, dangerous. Digital cages, masquerading as a more palatable version of enforcement and surveillance, create devastating harms that are hidden in plain sight, while duping us into thinking of these measures as more humane. This article concludes by arguing that digital cages are a “reformist reform” that merely make more efficient the kind of oppressive and racialized violence that has long informed the United States’ immigration enforcement regime. If we truly seek an end to this violence, this article argues for abolition—not just of detention, but of the digital cages next in line to replace detention.

Keywords: immigration, immigration law, immigration detention, abolition, surveillance, enforcement

JEL Classification: K37