THE IRON CAGE OF IMMIGRANT DETENTION: TEXTUAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE OVERSIGHT BUREACRACY AND STATE VIOLENCE

Immigration detention in the U.S. has seen a recent surge in the post 9/11 era where concerns over terrorism and national security have materialized into key enforcement initiatives, that is increased border security (mostly concentrated at the Southern U.S. border) and the expansion and rejuvenation of a mass detention apparatus spanning the country. This three-article style dissertation explores how conditions of confinement in the U.S. immigration detention system are discursively situated by analyzing authoritative reports used by the Department of Homeland Security to determine detention facility compliance with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Performance Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS). By utilizing critical sociolegal theoretical frameworks and critical discourse analysis, each manuscript situates the power of discourse as it pertains to institutional actors, namely detainee/residents and other institutional affiliates. Manuscript #1 reveals that detainee/resident concerns are consistently framed in such a way that delegitimizes their voice and autonomy by reinforcing the normalization of the carceral experience and the general application of crime control models as a deterrent to immigration. Manuscript #2 explores how policies, standards, and discourses surrounding food services and hunger strikes are constructed to erase the subjectivities and politics of food and undermine detainee autonomy using medical models and processes of medicalization. Manuscript #3 focuses on an analysis of grievance procedure deficiencies revealing how authoritative disciplined writing via oversight and institutional documentation processes and procedures reproduce assemblages of power and structures of domination that lay at the intersection of material documents and institutional nodes of knowledge production. Detainees subject to deportation face various institutional policies that may be especially ineffective in protecting them from structural violence and institutionally situated harm