Elizabeth Detention Center by Nancy Hiemstra

Elizabeth Detention Center by Nancy Hiemstra

The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.

Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history and its location in New Jersey's political economy and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the United States.

Ulla D. Berg is an associate professor of anthropology and Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University. She is a socio-cultural and visual anthropologist by training, and her research focuses on migration, (im)mobility, detention, and deportation in Latin America and among US Latinx populations. She is the author of Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (2015).

Carolina Sánchez Boe is an adjunct lecturer at Brown University in Paris. She is a sociologist and anthropologist, and her research focuses on confinement, deportation, and illegalization in the United States and France. She has worked in the nonprofit sector for over a decade. She has directed the documentary Digital Detention (2025).