Elizabeth Detention Center
A Social History of Immigration Detention in New Jersey and the United States
Carolina Sánchez Boe editor Ulla D Berg editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Rutgers University Press
Publishing:14th Jul '26
£22.99
This title is due to be published on 14th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.
Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history and its location in New Jersey's political economy and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the United States.
"The range of authorial voices, which offer multiple different understandings of detention from legal, social, economic, and first-person perspectives, create a robust and informative scholarship. Through two dozen brief chapters written by journalists, academics, lawyers, activists, and former detainees, this book offers readers remarkable insights into the U.S. detention system today." - Ruth Gomberg, author of Labor and Legality: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network
"Where immigration scholarship often focuses on legal frameworks and systems, this collection of essays and reflections reminds us of the people caught in the machinery and those working collectively to stop the system from running as intended. The intimate focus brings us into the New Jersey immigrant rights ecosystem, and we feel in community with lawyers, faith leaders, teachers, visitors, students, and immigrants. There is so much to learn from them." - Elissa C. Steglich, coauthor of The Unending Floods: Disaster Recovery and Immigration Policy
ISBN: 9781978845831
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 20mm
Weight: 454g
290 pages