The purpose of the U.S. deportation system is not merely to enforce immigration laws on the books; it is, more fundamentally, to construct an apparatus that generates humiliation, dehumanization, and the perception of the expendability of non-citizens, particularly non-white immigrants whose bodies, whether citizen or not, remain differentially excluded from the body politic.
My colleague Nancy Hiemstra has written about the use of the term “body” in her book Detain and Deport. Detention center staff refer to a person as a body, to a group of detained people as bodies. “We just booked in 17 bodies.” “No, we don’t have that body here, they transferred out three days ago.” As plenty of social theorists have observed, the term “body” uniquely points to a human being without revealing whether that person is living or dead.
This indeterminacy is not an accident or a weakness in the term. Rather, this indeterminacy does political work by revealing and enacting a consequential ambivalence over whether the body is alive or dead. To refer to people as bodies is to treat their lives as matters of material inputs and outputs, objects of logistical management like Amazon packages, rather than persons who enjoy certain minimum standards of ethical care.
The rise in the number of deaths inside immigrant detention centers under the current administration is cause for concern. One form that this concern takes for me is not only whether the agency cares about migrants’ lives (it seems clear that they don’t), but how the agency operationalizes its indifference towards migrants’ lives through attention and inattention to migrants’ well-being.
These questions are not abstract. As you may have heard, there was another detention death this week, this time in Folkston, Georgia. A Salvadoran man named Luis Sandoval died from what is currently reported as consistent with suicide — although a full investigation is needed to understand the whole story. ICE’s official announcement here.
This happened inside the same facility where a group of detained people are on a hunger strike to protest detention conditions, including “moldy food, foul-smelling water, freezing cells, sleep deprivation, untreated dental pain and months-long waits for care,” according to Migrant Insider (read the full article below). In response to the hunger strike, ICE has approved forced-feeding, a method that experts say amounts to torture.