Event Announcement: "Immigration Detention, Inc.", a Live Conversation with Nancy Hiemstra and Dee Conlon about the Big Business of Locking Up Migrants
As Congress considers expanding immigrant detention from 41,000 to 100,000 beds, this timely discussion will unpack the political and economic forces fueling the detention system.
I’m thrilled to invite you to a special virtual event featuring my colleagues—and fellow geographers—Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon, whose new book Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants offers one of the most thorough, urgent, and critical accounts of the immigrant detention system to be published in years.
The timing could not be more crucial. As Congress weighs an unprecedented $45 billion expansion of immigrant detention—from 41,000 to 100,000 beds—this conversation will dive deep into the political and economic machinery that keeps detention not only running, but thriving.
Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork and investigation, Nancy and Deirdre trace the financial incentives and structural dependencies that drive detention: from local governments to private equity firms, from cafeteria contracts to forced migrant labor. What emerges is a picture of a system that is not broken, but working exactly as designed—one that profits by turning hunger, illness, and human confinement into budget lines and dividends.
I’ve known Nancy and Deirdre for years. As scholars and as friends, they have deeply shaped how I think about space, power, and the hidden geographies of immigration enforcement. This book brings together the best of their critical insight and grounded research, and I couldn’t be more excited to host them for this conversation.
The event will be hosted virtually at 1:00 PM (Eastern US) on Wednesday June 25, 2025. Registration is required.
In preparation for the event, consider perusing my long list of recent posts about the growth of immigrant detention under the Trump administration, including my latest post on ICE’s detained population now crossing 50,000 for the first time in several years.
About the Authors
Nancy Hiemstra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on migration, border enforcement, and the geopolitics of security. Using ethnographic and qualitative methods, she explores the human consequences of immigration control policies in the U.S. and Latin America.
Deirdre Conlon is an Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. Her work critically examines the intersections of migration, incarceration, and neoliberalism, with a focus on the financial and institutional structures that enable immigrant detention in the United States.
About the Book
Immigration Detention, Inc. is published by Pluto Press, a fantastic independent publishing house in the UK. The book has already received high praise from friends of this Substack newsletter, such as Reece Jones, Mary Bosworth from Border Criminologies, and Todd Miller from the Border Chronicle.
Pre-order the book at Pluto Press’s website before it comes out later this month.
Praise for Immigration Detention, Inc.:
'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
'In this shocking exposé of conditions in US immigration detention facilities, Conlon and Hiemstra reveal the high costs of privatisation—most obviously for those who are detained but also for the wider US society. Much of what is described is unfathomable: rotting food; failure to treat basic medical problems; gynaecological procedures undertaken without consent. Such matters are not exceptional, they are 'business as usual', the system working as designed. As states around the world turn with ever greater enthusiasm to immigration detention, this book offers a stark warning of all that will be lost in the process' - Mary Bosworth, Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford
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