Immigrant Detention - History, Rights, and What's Next?
Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power. Although the rhetoric surrounding these individuals is extreme, Elliott Young showed that the US government has been locking up immigrants since the late nineteenth century, often for indefinite periods and with limited ability to challenge their confinement. View the Forever Prisoners Trailer here.
This event featured Elliott Young, Professor of History at Lewis & Clark College, and focused on his book, Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System. He was joined by Director of the Detainee Rights Clinic (UMN Law School) Linus Chan and IHRC Director Erika Lee.
About the speakers
Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. Professor Young is the author of three books: Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII, Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, and the new book Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System. He is co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History and is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 350 asylum cases.
Linus Chan is an Associate Professor of clinical law and the director of the Detainee Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is an immigration attorney that focuses removal defense for those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He also teaches in the area of intersection of criminal and immigration law.
The following is a recording of this event: