Profit and Protest: The Business of Immigration Detention

The United States has the largest immigration detention system globally, growing from a capacity of under 5,000 detainees per day in the 1980s to record highs of over 70,000 people by 2026. Although the harshest anti-immigrant rhetoric is often linked to Republicans, the expansion of the nation’s detention infrastructure and carceral policies has increased significantly under both political parties. Drawing on involvement with anti-detention organizations in the US, UK, and Australia, Morris discusses the ways that immigration detention generates income, even as instances of abysmal detention conditions and abuse increase. Morris considers the tensions surrounding anti-detention advocacy, where a focus on detention reform and refugee rights complicates abolitionist action.

Bio: Julia Morris is Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Visiting Politics Faculty at Scripps College. She holds a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Previously, she was a Post-doctoral Fellow at The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and a Research Student at Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Her research focuses on the political economy of migration and border externalization, from ethnographic fieldwork in Nauru, Australia, and Geneva to research projects in Jordan and Guatemala. She has published widely and is the author of Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru (2023) with Cornell University Press.