The trio of scholars will discuss “Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants” — the new book authored by Dr. Conlon and Dr. Hiemstra.

Nancy Hiemstra and a panel of scholars discuss her new co-authored book (with Deirdre Conlon), a damning exposé of the ways immigration detention generates income while those detained are starved, sickened, and exploited, and how that profit making is driving the explosive growth of the U.S. detention system today.

The United States has the most extensive immigration detention system in the world, expanding from a capacity of less than 5,000 detainees per day in the 1980s to 52,000 by 2019, and even higher today. While the most vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric may be attributed to Republicans, US detention infrastructure has grown exponentially regardless of the political party in power as reports of abysmal detention conditions pile up.

Nancy Hiemstra is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook. A political geographer whose research focuses on US immigration enforcement policies, she is co-author of Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants, author of Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime, and co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention.

Deirdre Conlon is Associate Professor of Geography based at the University of Leeds. 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-author of Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants, and co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention and Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention.