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Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Only recently has imprisonment become a central feature of both t across every level of government and involving civil and criminal law enforcement tools.

Examining the population as a whole provides crucial insights as to how we arrived at this state of mass immigration imprisonment. While political motivations — parallel to those that fueled the rapid expansion of criminal mass incarceration — may have started the trend, this Article demonstrates that key legal and policy choices explain how imprisonment has become an entrenched feature of immigration law enforcement. In fact, legislators and immigration officials have locked themselves into this choice, …