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106 Cornell Law Review Online Issue 1

Book Review—Yearning to Breathe Free: Migration Related Confinement in America

Danielle C. Jefferis. Assistant Professor, California Western School of Law. I owe deep gratitude to Professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. His research and scholarship are significant contributions to this field and have pushed me to think critically about my own work. He and I, along with Carrie Rosenbaum and Jennifer Chacón, were in conversation about this book during an Author Meets Reader session at the Law and Society’s 2020 Annual Meeting, and our dialogue refined this piece. I also thank the editors of Cornell Law Review, including Gabriela Markolovic, Nicholas Pulakos, and Victor Flores, who have diligently and skillfully prepared this piece for publication during especially unsettled times. Any and all errors are mine.

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14 Oct 2020

Book: MIGRATING TO PRISON: AMERICA’S OBSESSION WITH LOCKING UP IMMIGRANTS. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. 2019. 190 pages. 

Migrating to Prison assumes a primary position among the growing body of legal scholarship that focuses on the role of incarceration in immigration regulation. This Review explores two key contributions of the book, while situating the work among other scholarship on immigration-related confinement, including my own.11. See generally Danielle C. Jefferis, Constitutionally Unaccountable: Privatized Immigration Detention, 95 IND. L. J. 144, 160 (2020) (discussing “for-profit, civil immigration detention” and examining “the absence of a constitutional tort remedy”); see also Danielle C. Jefferis, Delegating Care, Evading Review: The Federal Tort Claims Act and Access to Medical Care in Federal Private Prisons, 80 L.A. L. REV. 37 (2019) [hereinafter Jefferis, Delegating Care, Evading Review] (highlighting how the “the Federal Tort claims Act’s independent-contractor exception” is used to evade the “nondelegable duty of care owed to prisoners in its custody”); see also René Lima-Marín & Danielle C. Jefferis, It’s Just Like Prison: Is a Civil (Nonpunitive) System of Immigration Detention Theoretically Possible?, 96 DENV. L. REV. 955, 956 (2019) (questioning the possibility of a nonpunitive system of immigration detention). Part I traces the rise, fall, and subsequent rise (again) of immigration imprisonment in the United States. Part II describes the scope of immigration detention pursuant to both civil and criminal legal authority and the poor, largely unchecked, conditions inside the facilities incarcerating people for migration-related reasons. Part III examines the book’s normative proposal: that abolishing immigration imprisonment is possible and should be pursued. This Review concludes by offering that Migrating to Prisons is an integral piece of a multi-faceted, growing body of literature that challenges the legal—and moral—foundations of migration-related confinement. 

To read more of this Book Review, click here: Yearning to Breathe Free: Migration Related Confinement in America.

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↑1 See generally Danielle C. Jefferis, Constitutionally Unaccountable: Privatized Immigration Detention, 95 IND. L. J. 144, 160 (2020) (discussing “for-profit, civil immigration detention” and examining “the absence of a constitutional tort remedy”); see also Danielle C. Jefferis, Delegating Care, Evading Review: The Federal Tort Claims Act and Access to Medical Care in Federal Private Prisons, 80 L.A. L. REV. 37 (2019) [hereinafter Jefferis, Delegating Care, Evading Review] (highlighting how the “the Federal Tort claims Act’s independent-contractor exception” is used to evade the “nondelegable duty of care owed to prisoners in its custody”); see also René Lima-Marín & Danielle C. Jefferis, It’s Just Like Prison: Is a Civil (Nonpunitive) System of Immigration Detention Theoretically Possible?, 96 DENV. L. REV. 955, 956 (2019) (questioning the possibility of a nonpunitive system of immigration detention).