Nancy Hiemstra, associate professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, has published a new book titled Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants (Pluto Press, 2025). Hiemstra began her research on the topic in 2012 and noted that immigration detention has grown significantly over the past three decades.
“I’ve studied detention for years,” said Hiemstra. “Initially I had this assumption that detention would decrease, but instead it’s only grown over the last three decades, and now it’s just picking up steam.”
Hiemstra co-authored the book with Dierdre Conlon from the University of Leeds. Their collaboration started in 2012 and led to several academic articles before they decided to reach a broader audience through their book.
“We began with the realization that detention wasn’t going anywhere, and we wanted to reach a wider audience than we were reaching in academic venues,” said Hiemstra.
She remarked on the current political climate surrounding immigration: “We didn’t envision the scope of what the current Trump administration is doing right now, which is a worst-case scenario in terms of growth of the detention system in the US,” she said. “Because of that this book is very timely. Unfortunately, the reason for it being timely is very distressing.”
Hiemstra explained how economic factors drive communities to support immigrant detention facilities as stable sources of income. She first became interested in U.S. immigration enforcement while researching human smuggling in Ecuador during her dissertation work in 2008. Her experience volunteering there shifted her focus toward understanding how families lost contact with detained relatives.
“It quickly became clear that this was an industry, and an extension of the prison industrial complex,” she said about her findings on immigration detention.
Hiemstra described how U.S. immigration laws have been used historically to shape national identity along racial lines: “A lot of those have to do with maintaining race-based ideas of the white national identity that has been present throughout US history,” she said. She added that immigrants are often scapegoated during economic downturns despite not being responsible for them.
She traced modern attitudes toward immigration back to policy changes from the 1980s onward: “After a period of not a lot of immigration in the 1960s, we changed immigration laws in ways that led to changing demographics…That combined with economic downturn…gave the country even more incentive to scapegoat immigrants.”
According to Hiemstra, both major political parties have supported expanding detention infrastructure over time: “You see that logic being used by Ronald Reagan, and then later by Bill Clinton…It was during the Clinton administration that some key laws made more people detainable and called for more detention infrastructure took root. But both parties and all administrations have used this criminalizing language around immigrants.”
The economic network supporting immigrant detention includes companies providing food services, medical care, commissary items and transportation as well as local communities relying on these centers for revenue streams.
“Look at Ron DeSantis with ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ with the promise from the Trump administration that they will be reimbursed,” she said. “They’ve turned it into this ‘build it and we will fill it’ mentality…But it’s horrifying.”
Hiemstra hopes her book challenges assumptions about necessity or effectiveness of immigrant detention: “There are certainly other shameful parts in our history like Japanese internment,” she said. “But detaining people is not necessary…It just furthers narrative that all immigrants are criminals. But statistics actually show opposite.”
She also argued for removing profit incentives tied to immigrant detention: “If people were not making money or if it wasn’t filling other gaps in our economy we wouldn’t be doing it.” On solutions moving forward she suggested higher standards for detainee treatment including paying minimum wage rather than $1 per day as currently practiced.
“The risk is that once you get these detention infrastructures in place…we’re eventually going run out people who are undocumented,” she warned. “So who’s next? What other legal residents or even citizens can be thrown into detention?…We’re creating this very hungry machine for bodies to be put through …as revenue generators.”
