Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire

Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire

An intimate expect at the people ensnared past the U.Southward. detention and displacement system, the largest in the world

Published 2016 by Beacon Printing

Available in difficult cover, paperback, or audiobook from your local bookstore or library.

"Intimate and heartbreaking…For those who have been searching for an accurate look at people caught between borders, this is it."
– Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Margaret Regan has done it again. With beautiful, absorbing prose and meticulous research, she captures the intense and intimate stories of those detained, deported, and forcibly separated from their families past the nearly massive detention and deportation system we've ever had in the United States. A powerful and deeply moving book."
– Todd Miller, author of Edge Patrol Nation

Summary

"On a bright Phoenix morning time, Elena Santiago opened her door to find her house surrounded by a platoon of federal immigration agents. Her children screamed equally they watched their mother handcuffed and driven away. Within hours, she was deported to the rough edge town of Nogales, Sonora, with nothing but the clothes on her back. Her two-year-old-girl and fifteen-twelvemonth-former son, both American citizens, were taken by the land of Arizona and consigned to foster care. Their mother's just offense: living undocumented in the United States.

Immigrants like Elena who've lived in the The states for years are being detained and deported at unprecedented rates. Thousands languish in detention centers—often torn from their families —for months or even years. Deportees are returned to fierce Central American nations or unceremoniously dropped off in unsafe Mexican border towns. Despite the dangers of the desert crossing, many volition skid across the border again, stopping at zero to go habitation to their children.

Drawing on years of reporting in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, journalist Margaret Regan tells their poignant stories. Within the massive Eloy Detention Center, a for-profit private prison in Arizona, she meets detainee Yolanda Fontes, a female parent separated from her iii small children. In a Nogales soup kitchen, deportee Gustavo Sanchez, a young father who'd lived in Phoenix since the age of 8, agonizes almost the risks of the journeying dorsum.

Regan demonstrates how increasingly draconian detention and deportation policies have broadened law powers, while enriching a individual prison manufacture whose profits are derived from human suffering. She also documents the rise of resistance, profiling activists and young immigrant "Dreamers" who are fighting for the rights of the undocumented.

Compelling and heartbreaking, Detained and Deported offers a rare glimpse into the lives of people ensnared in America'southward immigration dragnet."

–Beacon Press, 2016

Excerpts

Al Jazeera America ran an extract from the affiliate "In the Urban center of the Deported" March five, 2015.

The Tucson Weekly published an abridged version of the affiliate "Yolanda in Limbo," with photos by Jay Rochlin; March 12, 2015.

Media & Interviews

To read an interview nearly the book with Jim Nintzel, Tucson Weekly, (March 5, 2015) click hither.

For a selection of lectures and interviews well-nigh Detained and Deported click here.

Reviews of Detained and Deported

Starred review in Publishers Weekly:

Twenty meg immigrants entered the United States, both legally and illegally, between 1990 and 2010. As Regan (The Death of Josseline), passionately and eloquently argues, the related increase in detainment and deportation has been treated as a business opportunity, leading to grievous mistreatment. In this well-documented written report, Regan recounts the stories of undocumented immigrants, focusing on those in Arizona. According to the volume, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Water ice) has, in the course of deporting hundreds of thousands of people yearly, separated families and forced American-built-in children with loving parents into the foster system, charged immigrants with overly serious felonies, and allowed abusive conditions to foster in detainment centers. Moreover, deportees frequently air current up in unfamiliar, even unsafe circumstances when they leave the U.South. Regan is a skilled interviewer, making the stories included hither intimate and heartbreaking. She critically examines the failure of U.S. clearing policies while also highlighting efforts to help, both from individuals and nonprofit organizations. For those who take been looking for an accurate await at people caught betwixt borders, this is it.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A timely look at the inhumane effects of immigration policies in the United States. Tucson Weekly columnist Regan, who told harrowing tales of immigrants trying to cross from Mexico into Arizona in her previous book, The Death of Josseline (2010), here turns to the treatment of undocumented immigrants who succeeded in making it across the edge. As before, the author relates individuals' specific experiences while revealing the policies and the institutions that impact their lives and determine their fates. She is deeply sympathetic to the plight of undocumented workers caught in a system that profits from their incarceration and treats them with indifference at best and inhumanity at worst. The start portion of the book focuses on detention, the next on deportation and the terminal on resistance to the system. While the writer writes of outrageous conditions, this book is not a rant. The facts she straightforwardly presents inform readers of the harsh, prisonlike weather at detention centers operated by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America, specifically ones at Eloy and Florence, Arizona. Information technology comes equally no surprise to larn that the Eloy eye has the nation's highest rate of inmate deaths due to suicide or medical fail. Regan also reveals the anguish of parents abruptly separated from their children—legal citizens of the United States—and deported to Mexico, where they have not lived in years and have no ties. The book's few bright spots include accounts of pro bono lawyers trying to untangle the spider web of clearing laws and of volunteer groups similar Casa Mariposa, which provides nutrient and shelter to newly liberated detainees dumped by regime at Tucson's isolated bus station. Together, Regan's books bring into focus the fates of undocumented people fighting against the odds to make it into America and so, if they get here, struggling, and oft declining, to build a life.

From Booklist:

"Not for zip was Eloy named for Jesus's weep of despair," announcer Regan writes in this scathing review of current detention and deportation practices involving undocumented immigrants in the U.Due south. Kickoff with the Eloy Detention Eye, operated by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America, Regan gives detailed accounts of the inhumane conditions, inadequate care, and unjust handling detainees receive at the easily of hostile staff and predatory prosecutors.

Take the instance of Yolanda, who tried to escape an abusive relationship, and then was forced into sex slavery, only to go arrested and charged with running a prostitution ring. Information technology took the intervention of several lawyers and two years of appeals for Yolanda, separated from her three children, to receive a T visa, given to victims of human trafficking.Together with other horrifying case studies, Regan provides discomfiting statistics to document the rise of the detention-industrial complex. (In 1995, the Eloy facility held only 395 bunks. By 2014, it had 1,596.)

This important work should be read together with Regan'southward previous exposé,The Expiry of Josseline (2010).

— Diego Báez

From Shelf Sensation:

Twenty million immigrants arrived in the Us between 1990 and 2010, in an ongoing wave of immigration comparable to the acme years of Ellis Island. In response, there has been a historically similar rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and border control legislation. InDetained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Burn down, Arizona announcer Margaret Regan (The Death of Josseline) reports on the enormous and growing border and immigration enforcement system, through the personal experiences of immigrants from Central and South America and of their family members, employers, friends and advocates.

Regan states that at the beginning of the 21st century, immigrants are more than likely to have lived and worked in the U.Southward. for many years and, if the parents are deported, to have young children placed in foster care or adopted. With their roots and close family in the U.S. rather than in their legal state of origin, deportees are willing to take extreme risks to return. Regan is a persistent and sensitive interviewer, and her long feel reporting on these issues deeply informs her narrative equally she investigates detention centers, courts, shelters and late-nighttime autobus stations, interviewing a variety of immigrants, pro bono lawyers, community volunteers and Mexican repatriation workers. She makes a strong statement that, as of 2015, the immigrant detention system is not but inhumane just also corrupt and ineffective: a gilded mine for private contractors, a waste of millions in taxpayer dollars and destructive to families in ways that seem likely to brood time to come social and economic costs.

Notice:An intimate test of the human and economic costs of the decadent and inhumane U.Due south. immigration enforcement system.

— Sara Catterall

From the Arizona Daily Star:

Tucson journalist Margaret Regan puts a human face on the plight of the undocumented in this riveting account of human suffering on our doorstep. Regan, who writes for the Tucson Weekly, relates the stories of the real people behind the regime statistics and describes in heartbreaking particular what information technology looks like when you lose it all. Splintered families, lost livelihoods, children swallowed up in the CPS maze, and ineffectual regime agencies working at cross purposes are common themes, merely perchance most disturbing is the fact that incarceration is a growth manufacture in the Southwest. The greater the number of detainees in detention centers, the fatter the profits of the privately-owned prisons housing them. Their prosperity comes at a cost measured in anguish, and Regan posits that information technology's a cost nosotros should not pay.

—Helene Woodhams