On December 31, 2020, in the waning days of the Trump administration, a 58-year-old man from The Bahamas named Jesse Jerome Dean Jr. was set to be released from prison. Dean had been arrested and charged with drug trafficking in Florida in 1995, but he maintained his innocence and refused a plea bargain, which resulted in a thirty-year prison sentence. Over the course of more than two decades of incarceration, Dean was transferred to several federal prisons until he finally ended up at a privately operated immigrant prison in Baldwin, Michigan.
Upon his release, Dean was looking forward to reuniting with his family in The Bahamas, including his son, who had been only eight years old when his father was first taken into the custody of the US government. But Dean wasn’t a US citizen. Instead of being freed that December day in 2020, he was transferred yet again to a county jail in Battle Creek, Michigan, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rents bed space, to await deportation. During his thirty-five days in ICE custody, Dean’s health deteriorated. He complained twenty-seven times about abdominal pains and lost seventeen pounds. Staff ignored his protests for medical attention. One nurse threatened him with a citation for “interfering with staff duties.” On January 30, 2021, he told medical staff, “I feel like I’m going to die.” And five days later, twenty-six years after he was first imprisoned by the federal government, Dean passed away.
I had been organizing against immigrant detention for nearly two decades when I first learned about Dean’s death, and yet, I struggled to make sense of it. My work as an organizer taught me things that should have explained a moment like this. From having read dozens of death reports over the years, I knew in detail how horribly immigrants were treated inside detention centers. I also knew that Black men dying in the custody of the US government was not an uncommon occurrence. Dean died less than a year after one of the largest series of protests in US history had been set off by the brutal murder of George Floyd. Jesse Dean was now another addition to the list of Black people dying at the hands of the state. Still, even knowing all of this, Dean’s death rattled me. I couldn’t accept that this man—who had spent most of his adult life behind bars and was finally going to be freed and reunited with his family—had just been left to die. And despite working at an organization that advocates for an end to immigrant detention, I knew that his time in ICE custody was only part of the injustice he had experienced over twenty-six years in prison.
Dean’s story illustrates something that more people in the immigrant justice movement have come to realize in recent years: the US immigration enforcement system and the prison industrial complex are not separate, as is commonly understood, but are intertwined systems of repression. While some may see this relationship as a more recent phenomenon, accelerated by the post-9/11 crackdown on immigrant communities, migrants have long been labeled “illegal” or “criminal” as a strategy for controlling their movements and preventing their acceptance into US society. The harmful effects of these labels have only been compounded by the growth of mass incarceration. Today, the United States incarcerates nearly two million people in prisons, jails, and detention centers.
To understand how these systems are intertwined in the ways they are today, we have to return to the 1980s and 1990s. As abolitionist scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argue, it was during this period that prisons expanded as a “solution” to the economic, social, and political conditions of the time, notably rising social inequality and the erosion of welfare. The policy approach to immigration began to follow a similar path, and immigrants became a central target of the nativist agenda in Congress. Dean’s experience with the US criminal legal system was a direct result of these shifts. Laws that had been passed during the height of the war on drugs resulted in his multidecade prison sentence and required his detention and deportation after his sentence was complete. He should still be alive today.
It was at the Critical Resistance South conference in April 2003 that I first learned about prison abolition. Prisons had expanded rapidly in the decades prior, but this shift did not make us safer. While crime panics focus on random acts of violence, people are much more likely to be murdered or raped by someone they know. People believe that prisons and police protect them from violent acts like rape and murder, but these crimes are largely unreported or go unsolved. Most people in prison are poor and working class. They are also disproportionately people of color. Black people are incarcerated at a rate six times that of white people. Opportunities for steady income and housing are few and far between for people released from prison, and many end up back in the system.
Prisons did nothing to help society. They didn’t prevent harm; they only caused more of it. What purpose did they serve? Why did they keep expanding? The framework of abolition and the questions it posed helped me make sense of the senseless. Abolition isn’t just about what we don’t want. Abolition is about the world we want to create.
It wasn’t until I started organizing around federal policy at Detention Watch Network (DWN) in 2009, when Barack Obama had just taken office, that I began to better understand the nature of the abolitionist struggle—its arguments, its vision, and its practice. Abolition became a critical lens for our work at DWN and a theory of change. The Obama administration set out to reform the detention system early on and, in the process, it engaged with advocates to consider what reforms would be best to pursue. We raised concerns about conditions and encouraged alternatives to detention. The administration attempted to address these issues, but in the end, detention expanded, and deportations went through the roof. In response to the terrible conditions in detention centers, the Obama administration started contracting for even more private prison capacity, since the companies were willing to design facilities that ostensibly met their standards.
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During those years, private prisons went from operating less than half of the detention system to making up 70 percent of its capacity. And implementing alternatives to detention only widened the net of government surveillance. ICE started putting people on electronic monitoring who would otherwise never have been detained. Detention continued to increase, and now ICE had another tool at its disposal for keeping track of people. The reforms only served to make the machinery larger.
Abolition was more than just a vision. It helped us determine which reforms would further dismantle the system and which ones would only serve to fortify it. Once DWN adopted a detention abolition vision, our strategies and tactics became even sharper. Our approach shifted from a focus on conditions and alternatives to defunding and closing detention centers, aligning with abolitionist demands. A decade later, we finally started to win our campaigns to end immigrant detention contracts, something that had never happened before we had taken the position of abolition.
Here's an example. A few months prior to Dean’s death, in September 2020, a whistleblower report revealed that a doctor had performed hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures without consent on immigrant women locked up at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. An immediate deluge of coverage, investigations, and congressional visits followed.
That summer, as many immigrant rights organizations had been planning for the 2020 election, hoping for Trump’s defeat, and laying out blueprints for a potential new administration, the question of what to do about immigrant detention came up. For years, many establishment immigrant rights organizations had hesitated to call for the outright abolition of immigrant detention. But in the summer of 2020, for some, this demand didn’t seem so unfathomable anymore. After nearly four years of Trump in the White House, after living through a pandemic that ravaged prisons, jails, and detention centers, after a summer of protests that laid bare the inherent racism within our systems of governance, many realized that calling for an end to immigrant detention might be the only answer.
The salience of detention abolition had entered the mainstream immigrant rights movement. In combination with a long history of inside and outside organizing against Irwin, documentation of abuses by advocates and journalists, and a new administration, deeper shifts were possible. In May 2021, ten years after the facility first opened, the Department of Homeland Security ended the ICE contract with the Irwin County Detention Center. Despite President Joe Biden’s abysmal record on immigration, one that continued many Trump-era policies, Irwin wasn’t the only detention center to close. The Biden administration ended contracts at four additional detention centers over the next two years and requested less funding for immigrant detention in its annual budget. After forty years of constant detention expansion, we finally started to move the needle in the other direction.
Silky Shah is the author of UNBUILD WALLS: WHY IMMIGRANT JUSTICE NEEDS ABOLITION (out May 2024 from Haymarket Books) and the executive director of Detention Watch Network.
