VALLEY OF CAGED IMMIGRANTS: PUNISHMENT, PROTEST, AND THE RISE OF THE PORT ISABEL DETENTION CENTER1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n33.09 Jennifer Cullison2 Orcid ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5267-1143 University of Nevada, USA
[email protected] How to cite this article: Cullison, J. (2020). Valley of Caged Immigrants: Punishment, Protest, and the Rise of the Port Isabel Detention Center. Tabula Rasa, 33, 1-41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n33.09 Received: June 23, 2018 Accepted: August 27, 2018 Abstract: Despite popular understanding of immigrant detention in the US as effectively nonexistent before the 1980s, in reality the practice grew significantly over the early postwar era and especially in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley (RGV). Immigrant detention in the RGV became vital in the expanding network of the INS, other federal agencies, and for-profit institutions called here the Border Industrial Complex. Indeed, beginning in 1961 with its first full-fledged, permanent immigrant detention center, the Port Isabel Detention Center (PIDC), South Texas became a major piece of the Border Industrial Complex in its work to control, immobilize, and banish border crossers. Over the early postwar period, immigrant caging (or immigrant detention and immigrant incarceration based on immigration legal code) in the RGV transitioned from a temporary, situational response to a perpetual crisis. With growing Congressional support for immigration enforcement, by the 1970s, not only the INS, but also the US Marshals Service and the US Bureau of Prisons had greater numbers of people caged per immigration legal code. 1 This article is a product of a dissertation research project on the expansion of immigrant detention in the US, titled “The Growth of Immigrant Caging in Postwar America: National Immigration Policy Choices, Regional Shifts Toward Greater Carceral Control, and Continuing Legal Resistance in the U.S.