ABOUT THIS BOOK

The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.

Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history and its location in New Jersey's political economy and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the United States.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

ULLA D. BERG is an associate professor of anthropology and Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University. She is a socio-cultural and visual anthropologist by training, and her research focuses on migration, (im)mobility, detention, and deportation in Latin America and among US Latinx populations. She is the author of Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (2015).

CAROLINA SÁNCHEZ BOE is an adjunct lecturer at Brown University in Paris. She is a sociologist and anthropologist, and her research focuses on confinement, deportation, and illegalization in the United States and France. She has worked in the nonprofit sector for over a decade. She has directed the documentary Digital Detention (2025).

REVIEWS

“The range of authorial voices, which offer multiple different understandings of detention from legal, social, economic, and first-person perspectives, create a robust and informative scholarship. Through two dozen brief chapters written by journalists, academics, lawyers, activists, and former detainees, this book offers readers remarkable insights into the U.S. detention system today.”

— Ruth Gomberg, author of Labor and Legality: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network

“Where immigration scholarship often focuses on legal frameworks and systems, this collection of essays and reflections reminds us of the people caught in the machinery and those working collectively to stop the system from running as intended. The intimate focus brings us into the New Jersey immigrant rights ecosystem, and we feel in community with lawyers, faith leaders, teachers, visitors, students, and immigrants. There is so much to learn from them.”

— Elissa C. Steglich, coauthor of The Unending Floods: Disaster Recovery and Immigration Policy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Foreword

Nina Bernstein

Introduction

Ulla D. Berg and Carolina Sánchez Boe

PART I: The Early Years: From Esmor to CCA, 1993-1998

Chapter 1: Abraham Zuma's Preventable Death, or Why Immigration Detention Must be Abolished

Amy Gottlieb

Chapter 2: Shackled in the Land of Hope: Asylum Seekers Held for Months

Elizabeth Llorente

Chapter 3: The First Lawsuit Using International Human Rights Law to Protect Detained Immigrants in the United States

Penny Venetis

Chapter 4: Riot!

Fauziya Kassindja (with Layli Miller Bashir)

Chapter 5: “You’re Giving Them Too Much Hope.”

Will Coley

PART II: Mandatory Detention, Crimmigration, and the National Security State

Chapter 6: How a Good Immigrant/Bad Immigrant Binary Fuels the Modern Deportation Regime

Sarah Tosh

Chapter 7: A Journey to Freedom: My First Steps in the United States

Abdulai Bah

Chapter 8: “It’s not like you’re ever going to see this guy after he gets released today...”

Marguerite É. Marty, Esq.

Chapter 9: We Are IRATE!: Seven People in a New Jersey Diner and the Power of Accompaniment

William Westerman

Chapter 10: A New Jersey Teenager Caught in the War on Terror and Detained at EDC

‘Bilal’ (with Carolina Sanchez Boe)

PART III: Structures of Support, Advocacy, and Accompaniment

Chapter 11: A Permanent Executive Order from God: The Reformed Church of Highland Park’s Ongoing Response to EDC’s Systemic Sin

Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale

Chapter 12: Bed 26: Becoming a Refugee and Claiming Asylum

Edafe Okporo

Chapter 13: Touring the Elizabeth Detention Center: A Diary Comic

Kristyn Scorsone

Chapter 14: Due Process Army at the Elizabeth Immigration Court

Pina N. Cirillo

Chapter 15: Know Where You Stand and Stand There

Kathy O'Leary

PART IV: Economies of Detention

Chapter 16: Anti-Detention Laws, the EDC, and How New Jersey Became a Private-Detention-Only State

Katherine M. Sastre

Chapter 17: Big Business and Bad Care: The Sick Economics Behind the Elizabeth Detention Center

Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra

Chapter 18: From EDC to e-Carceration and Digital Surveillance: My Experience with Libre by Nexus

Julio Oseguera (with Ulla D. Berg)

Chapter 19: Who Are the Criminals? The Licit and Illicit Monetary Flows and State-Corporate Interests Fueling Migrant Detention in New Jersey and Beyond

K. Sebastian León

Chapter 20: Do You Want to Come Back? A Transgender Woman's Story Between Honduras and the EDC

Xiomara Flores (with Ulla D. Berg)

PART V: The End of Immigration Detention in New Jersey?

Chapter 21: Towards Abolition: Fighting Detention in Trump-Era New Jersey

Mary Rizzo and Whitney Strub

Chapter 22: “Daddy, this China?”: Ibrahim’s Experience in EDC During the COVID-19

Ibrahim (with Ulla D. Berg)

Chapter 23: Aganan v. Rodriguez and the Fight to #FreeThem All

Jessica Rofé

Chapter 24: Asylum Granted, Peace Denied: Fearing a New Era in January 2025

Ivo and Gabriel (with Gloria d’Alessio)

Chapter 25: The Detention Ban Ripple Effect: Defending Community Wins and Sustaining National Momentum

Gabriela Viera

Afterword

Silky Shah

Notes on Contributors

Index