Reading Between the (Redacted) Lines
Muddling Through Absent Presences In Public Information Requests On U.S. Immigration Detention
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v20i6.2090Keywords:
Immigration detention, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), transparency, expanding state power, absent presenceAbstract
In our research on U.S. immigration detention (the Detention Economies project) in the greater New York City area, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have been a key data source. Throughout the research process our efforts to gather information in order to interrogate detention economies were thwarted. In this paper we consider the slow, bureaucratic machinations of the state, government information office omissions, and redactions in response to FOIA requests, with analytic intent. Drawing on cultural geography’s engagements with ‘absent presence’ we examine the politics revealed by managing access to, and containing the flow of, information in this manner. We argue that through absent presence, the state contains migrants in immigration detention, constrains information and occludes knowledge about the infrastructure, operation, and beneficiaries of this bloated system, while, simultaneously, enlarging and consolidating power. Our discussion highlights some of the continuities as well as significant expansion of geographies of containment, with reference to immigration enforcement, from the Obama to the Trump administration. We also consider the importance of persistence, perseverance, and collective effort—or muddling through—as necessary research tactics for critical migration scholars and geographers amidst the present culture of obfuscation and secrecy that expands the geographies of state containment.
References
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Amnesty International. 2008. Jailed without justice: Immigration detention in the USA. https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/JailedWithoutJustice.pdf (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
Belcher, Oliver and Lauren Martin. 2013. Ethnographies of closed doors: conceptualizing openness and closure in US immigration and military institutions. Area, 45.4, 403-410.
Belcher, Oliver and Lauren Martin. 2019. Site visits, selective disclosure, and freedom on information in qualitative security research. In, Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins (eds.) Secrecy and Methods in Security Research A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 33-47.
Center for Constitutional Rights. 2017. Supreme Court rules in favor of government transparency against private prison corporations. [online] October 10: https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/supreme-court-rules-favor-government-transparency-against-private (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
Conlon, Deirdre and Nick Gill. 2015. Guest editorial: Interventions in migration and activism. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14.2, 442-451.
Conlon, Deirdre and Nancy Hiemstra. 2014. Examining the everyday micro-economies of immigration detention in the United States. Geographica Helvetica, 69, 335-344.
de Goede, Marieke, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins. 2019. Secrecy and Methods in Security Research: A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork. London and New York: Routledge.
DeLyser, Dydia. 2014. Tracing absence: Enduring methods, empirical research and a quest for the first neon sign in the USA. Area, 46, 40–49.
Dias, Isabela. 2019. ICE is detaining more people than ever-and for longer. Pacific Standard. August 1: https://psmag.com/news/ice-is-detaining-more-people-than-ever-and-for-longer (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
Edensor, Tim. 2005. The ghosts of industrial ruins: Ordering and disordering memory in excessive space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 829–849.
Fassett, C. 2019. The freedom of information act is getting worse under the Trump administration. Freedom of the Press Foundation. March 14: https://freedom.press/news/freedom-information-act-getting-worse-under-trump-administration/ (Retrieved May 30, 2020).
Freedom for Immigrants. 2017. Visitation Denials and Restrictions [online]. https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/visitation-denials (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
Frenzen, Niels. 2017. US Coast Guard Alien Migrant Interdiction Operation Statistics. Migrants at sea [blog]. February: https://migrantsatsea.org/us-coast-guard-alien-migrant-interdiction-operation-statistics/ (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
Gill, Nick. 2016. Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Government Accountability Project. 2017. ICE refuses to release basic agency documents. September 24: https://whistleblower.org/uncategorized/ice-refuses-to-release-basic-agency-documents/. (Retrieved December 10, 2019).
Hetherington, Kevin. 2004. Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal, and absent presence. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, 157-173.
Hiemstra, Nancy. 2019. Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Hiemstra, Nancy and Deirdre Conlon. 2017. Beyond privatization: Bureaucratization and the spatialities of immigration detention expansion. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5.3, 252-268.
Hiemstra, Nancy and Deirdre Conlon. 2016. Captive consumers and coerced labourers: Intimate economies and the expanding U.S. detention regime. In Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra (eds) Intimate economies of immigration detention: Critical perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 123-39.
Hutt, Peter B., Kevin Barnett, and Nooree Lee. 2019. Supreme Court shakes up FOIA Exemption for Confidential Information. Inside Government Contracts: Procurement Law and Policy Insights [online post]. June 26: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2019/06/supreme-court-shakes-up-foia-exemption-for-confidential-information/ (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
ICE. 2019. ICE Detention Management, Detention Statistics, Currently Detained Population. https://www.ice.gov/detention-management (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
ICE. 2020. Guidance on Covid-19 https://www.ice.gov/coronavirus (Retrieved June 1, 2020).
Kassie, Emily. 2019. How Trump inherited his expanding detention system. The Marshall Project. February 12: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/02/12/how-trump-inherited-his-expanding-detention-system (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
Loyd, Jenna and Alison Mountz. 2018. Boats, borders, and bases: Race, the Cold War and the rise of migration detention in the United States. Oakland: University of California Press.
Longhurst, Robin. 1995. The body and geography. Gender, Place and Culture 2.1, 97–106.
Maillet, Pauline, Alison Mountz, and Keegan Williams. 2017. Researching migration and enforcement in obscured places: practical, ethical and methodological challenges to fieldwork. Social & Cultural Geography, 18.7, 927-50.
May, Charlie. 2017. ICE wants to destroy records that show abuses and deaths of immigrants in custody. Salon, August 29: https://www.salon.com/2017/08/29/ice-wants-to-destroy-records-that-show-abuses-and-deaths-of-immigrants-in-custody/ (Retrieved December 6, 2021).
Mehta, Christine. 2018. Annual Report: FOIA lawsuits reach record highs in FY 2018. TRAC, November 12: http://foiaproject.org/2018/11/12/annual-report-foia-lawsuits-reach-record-highs-in-fy-2018/ Retrieved December 10, 2019.
Moran, Dominique and Tom Disney. 2019. ‘It’s a horrible, horrible feeling’: ghosting and the layered geographies of absent–presence in the prison visiting room. Social and Cultural Geography, 20.5, 692-709.
Mountz, Alison. 2010. Seeking asylum: Human smuggling and bureaucracy at the border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Oliveira, Nelson. 2019. ICE shut down immigrant hotline after it was featured on ‘Orange is the New Black.’ New York Daily News, December 12: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-ice-sued-for-ending-hotline-seen-in-orange-is-the-new-black-20191212-gloafxrixzf55aaz7bvci6uzei-story.html (Retrieved December 6, 2021).
Parr, Hester and Fyfe, Nicholas. 2012. Missing geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 37, 615–638.
Salzberg, Adrien. 2019. Takeaways from the Department of Homeland Security’s annual FOIA report. Muckrock, October 3: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/oct/03/dhs-fy18-annual-report-takeaways/ (Retrieved December 10, 2019).
Scholl, Sebastian, Lahr-Kurten, Matthias and Redepenning, Marc. 2014. Considering the Role of Presence and Absence in Space Constructions. Ethnography as Methodology in Human Geography. Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 39.2, 51-67.
Shields, Rob. 1992. A truant proximity: Presence and absence in the space of modernity. Environment and Planning, D: Society and Space, 10, 181–198.
Squire Vicki. 2015. The Securitisation of Migration: An Absent Presence? In Gabriella Lazaridis and Khursheed Wadia (eds) The securitisation of migration in the EU: The European Union in international affairs. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 19-36.
Stack, Liam. (2017) Donations to ACLU and other organizations surge after Trump’s order. The New York Times, January 30: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/aclu-fund-raising-trump-travel-ban.html (retrieved May 30, 2020).
Tegethoff, Eric. 2017. Civil rights groups sue over ICE refusing to release data. Public News Service, November 15: https://www.epbusinessjournal.com/2017/11/civil-rights-groups-sue-ice-refusing-foia-requests/ (Retrieved December 1, 2021).
Telford, Taylor. 2019. ICE refuses to turn over internal documents on facial recognition tech and detention tactics, lawsuit says. Washington Post, November 7: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/07/ice-refuses-turn-over-internal-documents-facial-recognition-tech-detention-tactics-lawsuit-says/ (Retrieved December 10,
2019).
TRAC, 2017. ICE refuses to release more comprehensive detainer data. March 20: https://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.170320.html (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
TRAC, 2019a. Growth in ICE detention fueled by immigrants with no criminal conviction. November 26: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/583/ (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
TRAC, 2019b. Incomplete and garbled immigration court data suggest lack of commitment to accuracy. October 31: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/580/ (Retrieved December 10, 2019).
TRAC, 2019c. FOIA Suits Rise Because Agencies Don’t Respond Even As Requesters Wait Longer To File Suit. December 15: http://foiaproject.org/2019/12/15/foia-suits-rise-because-agencies-dont-respond-even-as-requesters-wait-longer-to-file-suit/ (Retrieved May 30, 2020).
TRAC, 2021. When FOIA Goes to Court: 20 Years of Freedom of Information Act Litigation by News Organizations and Reporters. The FOIA Project. January 13: http://foiaproject.org/2021/01/13/foialitigators2020/ (Retrieved February 15, 2021).
Valentine Gill. 2010. Children’s Bodies: An Absent Presence. In Kathrin Hörschelmann and Rachel Colls (eds) Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 22-37.
YubaNet. 2017. Watchdog Organization Files Civil Rights Complaint Alleging Visitation Denials, Restrictions at 14 Immigration Detention Facilities. March 15: https://yubanet.com/usa/watchdog-organization-files-civil-rights-complaint-alleging-visitation-denials-restrictions-at-14-immigration-detention-facilities/ (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
Amnesty International. 2008. Jailed without justice: Immigration detention in the USA. https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/JailedWithoutJustice.pdf (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
Belcher, Oliver and Lauren Martin. 2013. Ethnographies of closed doors: conceptualizing openness and closure in US immigration and military institutions. Area, 45.4, 403-410.
Belcher, Oliver and Lauren Martin. 2019. Site visits, selective disclosure, and freedom on information in qualitative security research. In, Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins (eds.) Secrecy and Methods in Security Research A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 33-47.
Center for Constitutional Rights. 2017. Supreme Court rules in favor of government transparency against private prison corporations. [online] October 10: https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/supreme-court-rules-favor-government-transparency-against-private (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
Conlon, Deirdre and Nick Gill. 2015. Guest editorial: Interventions in migration and activism. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14.2, 442-451.
Conlon, Deirdre and Nancy Hiemstra. 2014. Examining the everyday micro-economies of immigration detention in the United States. Geographica Helvetica, 69, 335-344.
de Goede, Marieke, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins. 2019. Secrecy and Methods in Security Research: A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork. London and New York: Routledge.
DeLyser, Dydia. 2014. Tracing absence: Enduring methods, empirical research and a quest for the first neon sign in the USA. Area, 46, 40–49.
Dias, Isabela. 2019. ICE is detaining more people than ever-and for longer. Pacific Standard. August 1: https://psmag.com/news/ice-is-detaining-more-people-than-ever-and-for-longer (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
Edensor, Tim. 2005. The ghosts of industrial ruins: Ordering and disordering memory in excessive space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 829–849.
Fassett, C. 2019. The freedom of information act is getting worse under the Trump administration. Freedom of the Press Foundation. March 14: https://freedom.press/news/freedom-information-act-getting-worse-under-trump-administration/ (Retrieved May 30, 2020).
Freedom for Immigrants. 2017. Visitation Denials and Restrictions [online]. https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/visitation-denials (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
Frenzen, Niels. 2017. US Coast Guard Alien Migrant Interdiction Operation Statistics. Migrants at sea [blog]. February: https://migrantsatsea.org/us-coast-guard-alien-migrant-interdiction-operation-statistics/ (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
Gill, Nick. 2016. Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Government Accountability Project. 2017. ICE refuses to release basic agency documents. September 24: https://whistleblower.org/uncategorized/ice-refuses-to-release-basic-agency-documents/. (Retrieved December 10, 2019).
Hetherington, Kevin. 2004. Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal, and absent presence. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, 157-173.
Hiemstra, Nancy. 2019. Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Hiemstra, Nancy and Deirdre Conlon. 2017. Beyond privatization: Bureaucratization and the spatialities of immigration detention expansion. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5.3, 252-268.
Hiemstra, Nancy and Deirdre Conlon. 2016. Captive consumers and coerced labourers: Intimate economies and the expanding U.S. detention regime. In Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra (eds) Intimate economies of immigration detention: Critical perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 123-39.
Hutt, Peter B., Kevin Barnett, and Nooree Lee. 2019. Supreme Court shakes up FOIA Exemption for Confidential Information. Inside Government Contracts: Procurement Law and Policy Insights [online post]. June 26: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2019/06/supreme-court-shakes-up-foia-exemption-for-confidential-information/ (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
ICE. 2019. ICE Detention Management, Detention Statistics, Currently Detained Population. https://www.ice.gov/detention-management (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
ICE. 2020. Guidance on Covid-19 https://www.ice.gov/coronavirus (Retrieved June 1, 2020).
Kassie, Emily. 2019. How Trump inherited his expanding detention system. The Marshall Project. February 12: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/02/12/how-trump-inherited-his-expanding-detention-system (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
Loyd, Jenna and Alison Mountz. 2018. Boats, borders, and bases: Race, the Cold War and the rise of migration detention in the United States. Oakland: University of California Press.
Longhurst, Robin. 1995. The body and geography. Gender, Place and Culture 2.1, 97–106.
Maillet, Pauline, Alison Mountz, and Keegan Williams. 2017. Researching migration and enforcement in obscured places: practical, ethical and methodological challenges to fieldwork. Social & Cultural Geography, 18.7, 927-50.
May, Charlie. 2017. ICE wants to destroy records that show abuses and deaths of immigrants in custody. Salon, August 29: https://www.salon.com/2017/08/29/ice-wants-to-destroy-records-that-show-abuses-and-deaths-of-immigrants-in-custody/ (Retrieved December 6, 2021).
Mehta, Christine. 2018. Annual Report: FOIA lawsuits reach record highs in FY 2018. TRAC, November 12: http://foiaproject.org/2018/11/12/annual-report-foia-lawsuits-reach-record-highs-in-fy-2018/ Retrieved December 10, 2019.
Moran, Dominique and Tom Disney. 2019. ‘It’s a horrible, horrible feeling’: ghosting and the layered geographies of absent–presence in the prison visiting room. Social and Cultural Geography, 20.5, 692-709.
Mountz, Alison. 2010. Seeking asylum: Human smuggling and bureaucracy at the border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Oliveira, Nelson. 2019. ICE shut down immigrant hotline after it was featured on ‘Orange is the New Black.’ New York Daily News, December 12: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-ice-sued-for-ending-hotline-seen-in-orange-is-the-new-black-20191212-gloafxrixzf55aaz7bvci6uzei-story.html (Retrieved December 6, 2021).
Parr, Hester and Fyfe, Nicholas. 2012. Missing geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 37, 615–638.
Salzberg, Adrien. 2019. Takeaways from the Department of Homeland Security’s annual FOIA report. Muckrock, October 3: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/oct/03/dhs-fy18-annual-report-takeaways/ (Retrieved December 10, 2019).
Scholl, Sebastian, Lahr-Kurten, Matthias and Redepenning, Marc. 2014. Considering the Role of Presence and Absence in Space Constructions. Ethnography as Methodology in Human Geography. Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 39.2, 51-67.
Shields, Rob. 1992. A truant proximity: Presence and absence in the space of modernity. Environment and Planning, D: Society and Space, 10, 181–198.
Squire Vicki. 2015. The Securitisation of Migration: An Absent Presence? In Gabriella Lazaridis and Khursheed Wadia (eds) The securitisation of migration in the EU: The European Union in international affairs. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 19-36.
Stack, Liam. (2017) Donations to ACLU and other organizations surge after Trump’s order. The New York Times, January 30: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/aclu-fund-raising-trump-travel-ban.html (retrieved May 30, 2020).
Tegethoff, Eric. 2017. Civil rights groups sue over ICE refusing to release data. Public News Service, November 15: https://www.epbusinessjournal.com/2017/11/civil-rights-groups-sue-ice-refusing-foia-requests/ (Retrieved December 1, 2021).
Telford, Taylor. 2019. ICE refuses to turn over internal documents on facial recognition tech and detention tactics, lawsuit says. Washington Post, November 7: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/07/ice-refuses-turn-over-internal-documents-facial-recognition-tech-detention-tactics-lawsuit-says/ (Retrieved December 10,
2019).
TRAC, 2017. ICE refuses to release more comprehensive detainer data. March 20: https://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.170320.html (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
TRAC, 2019a. Growth in ICE detention fueled by immigrants with no criminal conviction. November 26: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/583/ (Retrieved December 13, 2019).
TRAC, 2019b. Incomplete and garbled immigration court data suggest lack of commitment to accuracy. October 31: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/580/ (Retrieved December 10, 2019).
TRAC, 2019c. FOIA Suits Rise Because Agencies Don’t Respond Even As Requesters Wait Longer To File Suit. December 15: http://foiaproject.org/2019/12/15/foia-suits-rise-because-agencies-dont-respond-even-as-requesters-wait-longer-to-file-suit/ (Retrieved May 30, 2020).
TRAC, 2021. When FOIA Goes to Court: 20 Years of Freedom of Information Act Litigation by News Organizations and Reporters. The FOIA Project. January 13: http://foiaproject.org/2021/01/13/foialitigators2020/ (Retrieved February 15, 2021).
Valentine Gill. 2010. Children’s Bodies: An Absent Presence. In Kathrin Hörschelmann and Rachel Colls (eds) Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 22-37.
YubaNet. 2017. Watchdog Organization Files Civil Rights Complaint Alleging Visitation Denials, Restrictions at 14 Immigration Detention Facilities. March 15: https://yubanet.com/usa/watchdog-organization-files-civil-rights-complaint-alleging-visitation-denials-restrictions-at-14-immigration-detention-facilities/ (Retrieved December 12, 2019).
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Published
2021-11-17
How to Cite
Hiemstra, N., & Conlon, D. (2021). Reading Between the (Redacted) Lines: Muddling Through Absent Presences In Public Information Requests On U.S. Immigration Detention. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 20(6), 666–686. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v20i6.2090
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Section
SI - Carceral Geographies and Policing (eds. Boyce, Massaro & Christian)
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