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Accepted Paper:
Surveillance, Technology, Confinement: High Tech and Low Tech Pandemic Responses in US Immigration Detention
Ulla Berg
(Rutgers University)
This paper examines how the ways in which US detention facilities responded to the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to have long-standing “post-pandemic effects” not only for due process and for the rights of detained migrants but also for the overall organization of the US detention landscape.
Paper long abstract:
COVID-19 brought about significant changes to global migration control and confinement practices across the globe. In the United States, the total number of detained non-citizens fell significantly over the course of the pandemic - from close to 50,000 in FY 2019 to around 13,000 at the height of the pandemic to a current 20,146 held in ICE detention in March 2022. At the same time, the number of individuals and families monitored under ICE Alternatives to Detention (ATD) programs are at an all-time historic high two years from the onset of the pandemic. This paper takes the COVID-19 pandemic as a “diagnostic event” to examine how certain digital technologies and infrastructures of confinement became the default solutions for monitoring, surveilling, and managing detained migrants during a public health emergency, often to the great advantage of corporations producing such solutions, but to the detriment of detained migrants, their advocates, and families. The paper draws on collaborative fieldwork conducted on pandemic responses in four detention facilities in the state of New Jersey and the effects of these responses on detained migrants and their communities. Based on this research, I shall argue that the ways in which detention facilities responded to the pandemic have long-standing “post-pandemic effects” not only for due process and for the rights of detained migrants but also for the overall organization of the detention landscape in the United States.