César Cuauhtémoc: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants
Channel: Ed Mays
Date: 2019-12-12

For most of America’s history, we did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, our country’s federal and state governments have increasingly incarcerated people accused of violating immigration laws. Now almost 400,000 people annually spend time locked up pending the result of a civil or criminal immigration proceeding. Leading scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández joins us to take a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origin and operation with insight from his book Migrating to Prison. 

He tackles the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s, highlighting how enforcement resources were deployed disproportionately against Latinos. Hernández calls out the expansion of private prisons and decries disingenuous links drawn by the political right attempting to connect immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law. Through powerful stories of individuals caught up in the immigration imprisonment industry, Hernández makes an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of the way we determine who belongs in the United States.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is an immigration lawyer and a professor of law at the University of Denver. He runs the blog Crimmigration.com and regularly speaks on immigration law and policy issues. He has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and many others.

Thanks to Town Hall Seattle & Elliott Bay Books Recorded 12/10/19

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