by Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon
Pluto Press
6/20/2025, paperback
SKU: 9780745349466
The United States has the largest immigration detention system in the world. In the 1980s, it held fewer than 5,000 people each day. By 2024, that number was 39,000, and today it is increasing sharply again. While Republicans are often the loudest voices against immigration, the detention system expands no matter which party is in power.
Immigration Detention Inc. is a damning investigation of the ways immigration detention generates income while those imprisoned are starved, sickened, and exploited on a daily basis. Drawing on over a decade of research and focusing on detention centers in New Jersey and New York, Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon follow the money to map public and private financial relationships and trace how detention contracts for food, medical care, and in-facility stores are fought over to the penny. By breaking down how immigration detention works, they reveal a profit-driven system that harms and corrupts communities across the U.S. At a decisive moment in history, the call is clear: dismantle immigration detention systems everywhere.
Reviews:
"A vital and troubling look at the grotesque practices of the privatized immigration detention industry, whose soaring profits are dependent on inflicting extreme suffering. This book is a microcosm of what ails America in an era of rampant capitalism and exclusionary nationalism" -- Reece Jones, author of Nobody is Protected and White Borders
"The most thorough breakdown of the immigration enforcement industrial complex that I have ever read. With meticulous research and analysis, Hiemstra and Conlon not only delve into the everyday horrors people face in detention-including horrible food and faulty medical care-but also reveal the tentacles of power and finance behind immigration control. In other words, if you want to know what's really going on, and what you might do about it, you will find no book more important than this one" -- Todd Miller, journalist and author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders
"Who knew that hatred driven by racism could be so lucrative? Hiemstra and Conlon's Immigration Detention Inc. answers this with a resounding and meticulously researched exposé of the political and economic forces driving the expansion of immigrant detention. This book is essential reading for policymakers, activists, and anyone concerned with immigration justice and the deeply rooted connections between public and private sectors" -- Ravi Ragbir, immigration activist and co-founder of New Sanctuary Coalition
About the Author:
Nancy Hiemstra is a political geographer whose research focuses on US immigration enforcement policies. She is the author of Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime and co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention. She is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, US.
Deirdre Conlon is a critical geographer working in the US and Britain. Her work focuses on how immigration and border controls are proliferating as they are monetized. She is co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention and Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention. She is Associate Professor based at the University of Leeds.