On America's Obsession with Locking up Immigrants: Prof. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Todd Miller, Border Chronicle, Jan. 13, 2022

"When Joe Biden administration took office in January 2021, there were promises of a new direction in border and immigration enforcement, and that the policies of Donald Trump would be left behind. Now a year later, it seems important to look at what has and hasn’t been done, and what’s to come.

In terms of the immigrant detention system, I thought there would be no better person to talk to than César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, author of Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants. In the following audio interview García Hernández breaks down the actual promises of the new administration, and how they have held up over the last year, including the promise that it would remove private companies from immigration detention. García Hernández discusses immigration detention as a “core component” to the Biden administration’s enforcement regime that follows the footsteps not of Trump, but rather of the previous Barack Obama administration. He also raises concerns to keep an eye on as we move into 2022, a year that will be politically defined by the mid-terms, especially the potential for the administration to drift right to appease Republican hardline pressure. Thanks for listening!

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández was born and raised in the South Texas borderlands in McAllen. He is an expert on the intersection of immigration and criminal law which was the subject of his first book Crimmigration Law, published by the American Bar Association in 2015 and updated in 2021. García Hernández is currently the Gregory William Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and a law professor at Ohio State University, and has been publishing crimmigration.com since 2009 where you can find a repository of his work."