Topic: Carceral Geography in El Paso, Texas: Im/mobility

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a law professor and the Gregory Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University, a position he just accepted as of April 2021. Prior to this recent transition, Professor Hernandez was a tenured Associate Professor of Immigration Law at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, Associate Professor of Law at Capital University Law School, and Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa College of Law. He is originally from McAllen, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, descended from bracero workers. His impressive CV includes employment as an immigration attorney in the Rio Grande Valley area and Providence, RI, multiple publications, placement as a Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia in 2018, and his blog titled “Crimmigration”. He earned his BA with Honors in American Civilization and English from Brown University in 2002 and JD from Boston College Law School in 2007. He is regarded as a leading scholar in US Immigration Law and noted for coining the word “crimmigration” to describe, within a legal perspective, the process by which the United States has evolved its enforcement of immigration laws from civil to criminal proceedings.

He wrote Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants in 2019, during fierce public and political debate about migration into the US at its Southern border, wherein he argues that the US immigration system is not broken because it is functioning exactly as it was designed. Migrating to Prison aims to contextualize the modern debate about migrant entry to the US at the Southern border with a historical and legal perspective that allows readers to understand what crimmigration is and why he has chosen this mishmash word to describe the phenomenon.

Professor Hernández effectively argues that crimmigration is a natural arrival point on the United States’ nativist historical journey of objectifying people who migrate here. Migrants are, and have been throughout US History, an alien “other” subject to social and legal scrutiny that doesn’t comport with constitutional principles; the gradual legal justifications for this discordance have eroded constitutional principles as they relate to migrants, resulting in their mass imprisonment today. From a legal, constitutional perspective, civil proceedings are not to be conducted through a criminal lens but immigration has morphed into exactly that, with supportive case histories drawing back to the overtly racist nineteenth century Chinese Exclusion Act and the adoption of entry fiction in 1891, which created the modern system that is marked by routine, systematic detention of migrants by the state. Detention is incarceration, and the policies that have created mass incarceration of migrants are not inevitable, forgone conclusions but a systematic series of legal and political choices.

Within the framework of our project, Professor Hernández’s work is invaluable because it provides historical context to and studied explanation of mass incarceration of migrants. This work implicitly and to some extent explicitly raises questions about the architecture of migrant detention; in consideration of employer relations, are migrants’ workplaces carceral spaces? To the extent that, as Foucault posits, all workplaces are imbued with panopticism, how may migrant workplaces differ? Beyond immigration courts, state and private detention centers, and refugee advocacy sites, these workplaces heavily dot the landscape of El Paso.