so great to have you all here. as you know we are an independent bookstore and wine bar and events like this are our favorite thing to do so we're excited you could all comeout . if you are not here for the event the aware thatit's going on . tonight we have the honor of having cesar fernandez who has written migrating to prison, america's obsession with locking up immigrants. he is a professor of law at the university of denver and an immigration lawyer who runs immigration.com and speaks on immigration law and policy issues, he hasappeared in the new york times, wall street journal, npr, guardian and other venues . please give a big welcome to cesar. [applause] >> good evening. great to be here with all of you. it's really nice when i find out that i'm not the only one who thinks that spending a saturday night in a bookstore is the best option available. especially here. i actually wrote a decent chunk of migrating in prison over at the bar just behind some of you so i recommend the wine. but if the last few chapters start to meander, blame it on the hungarian tocai, not on me. so thanks for coming. like a lot of us in the united states, for me the story of migration, is that better? for me the story of migration is one that's much more than intellectual, much morethan a professional story . is my story about my lived experience. i was raised in mcallen texas which is a city just abutting, it's about five miles or so from the rio grande river in south texas and that's relevant because the river they are, this is a fairly semiarid part of the country. it's not an easy place to live, so the waterway, the river is the reason why there are communities that hug the rio grande and that people settled in this region many generations ago. and it happened well before this natural waterway that brought people together, then became the international boundary that forms the us-mexico border so my family straddled this formal international boundary. my parents worked there, the births of my siblings did and of course my daily existence for most of the first decades of my life did and in this context, for crossings or a routine fact of life. people cross the border for family occasions, just for monday and shopping trips, for medical appointments so our family had a binational, bicultural and a bilingual existence in this place and we were at once in 2 worlds and at the same time also living very much a singular experience . it is the experience of life along the borderlands so they are in this particular corner of the world, my parents managed to raise five children and in a migrant farmworker housing project by doing what many people do. by scrimping and by scrounging. we recycle cans for cash long before any ofus knew there was some environmental benefit to this . we stood in line for the free cheese and peanut butter that governments officials use to bring over to our neighborhood in large trucks. and all this happens in part because my parents didn't have much by way of formal education. my father finished highschool in texas . my mother finished third grade in a small town in the mountains in central mexico where she was born and raised . and she finished the third grade twice and it wasn't because she was doing poorly academically. it was because that was all that there was. the school and her town went through the third grade and she really enjoyed being in school so to stay in school, she for another year had to repeat the same grade that she had already done. and so to this day, i don't know. i can't say whether it's because of this lack of formal education or access to formal education or whether it's despite it, but whatever the reason, education was everything to my parents. they filled my mind, my siblings minds with the ambition for learning that they had been unable to fulfill themselves in their own lives. and by doing so they prepared me to thrive in worlds that growing up in south texas, i didn't know existed. they prepared us to thrive in worlds they didn't know existed. and to be sure, when i left that in between space of the borderlands, we often say we're not from one place or another place , when i left that in between space, i found myself startled and unmoored in the imposing halls of brown university. the ivy league which is what took me away on my community in south texas and after that, i was disoriented even more when i was pursuing a lawdegree in boston . but nonetheless, despite that i found the courage to transcend in that childhood, in that childhood of crossing boundaries. it was through these experiences, far away from the south texas community that breathes life into me that i came to see what was not apparent to me as a child . as a kid, knowing no other way of life, i had been unable to see the power that the law had on the border. and on the bodies that dared to cross the border. i did not know that the border patrol, that lucky mcgraw was not an everyday feature of life as experienced by most people in the united states. growing up in south texas i did not know that immigration checkpoints, about an hour north of the border would raise eyebrows outside of the region. i did not know that anything was strange about the occasional deal of sleeping on our couch in the living room as he made his way north for work. so i did not realize the power that the law actually had on my daily existence. until i took myself outside of that comfort zone in south texas and reflected on where it is that i had been. the one facet of south texas continued to remain hidden from my view until i returned to the region as a newly minted lawyer. i had my bar card, i was it was still shiny new in my hand and i returned so that i can represent my friends who were facing deportation proceedings alongside, i could represent them alongside my brothers in the law firm that they and i had together. i'm still a part of. and that facet of south texas life that was still unknown to meuntil i went back was the focus of this book . immigration prisons. all of a sudden i found myself representing clients in detention centers that i hadn't known existed. surrounded by onion cells are tucked into wildlife refuges. these places were remote even by the standards ofsouth texas . these were prisons in which people were incarcerated who, as it turns out, had been there all along. while i was being raised and yet, this had been, this was a story that was completely unknown to me . for me at least, they were effectively hidden in plain sight. i remember vividly the very first time that i drove to the port isabel detention center which is 1500 or so bed facility that is, that has been around since the mid-1980s and as i drove on a small road and never driven a long before, i actually pulled over to the side of the road at one point, just to admire the scenery. there were native bamboos growing from alongside some lakes and i remember seeing these gorgeous white birds that were just standing in the midst of these bamboos and i now know that these are egrets. but i didn't know that at the time, i've never seen anything like this so eventually i started the car up again and i continued along the path to the port isabel detention center and i didn't stop again until i got to guardhouse. outside of the facility, completely out of nowhere. and you're going from this gorgeous wildlife refuge and all of a sudden you run into the first securitycheckpoints . in order to part, you have to buy the guardhouse. they have to that you, see why you're there so then you're allowed to park in this completely ordinary parking lot. and you go to another security checkpoints to enter the facility. and inside, there are steel doors and there are security cameras all over the place, you're constantly being watched and you're being escorted. you're being escorted, you're not allowed to walk around mainly because this is a prison and your escorted to a cinderblock visitation room where the rare attorney meet with a client and i say rare attorney because in immigration court there is no right to government financed lawyers, but what that means is you're going through deportation proceedings while you're locked up and you can hire a lawyer if you can afford to , but most people can't so that meant that most people were going through the process of trying to fend off deportation while they were locked up in this facility and doing it by themselves. so now years later i'm privileged to call myself a law professor, a teacher, a writer and i've written for over a decade about the ever-growing intersection between criminal law and immigration law, about the criminalization of migrants themselves. and people often ask me how long have you been working on this book and the honest answer is i don't know. because i can't tell you. i think the idea for the book started on that drive to the port isabel detention center back in 2008 or so. but more fundamentally than that, it started i think when i was a child . and in my view, the law was nothing more than the power of the border patrol to decide who got to live with their family, who got to go to work. so i think it's actually the most accurate way i can respond to that question is to say that i've been working on this book in a sense as long as i've been doing this work. i've been working on thisbook in a sense as long as i've been living this work . incarceration is one of the harshest realities of this trend. it's the part of immigration policing that led to the death of a man named camiar samini with a green card in his hand and i showed up one day at the agency and took him to a private immigration prison in suburban denver, in aurora area not too far from where we're all gathered tonight. just two weeks later, he was dead. the government's pressrelease said that he died suddenly . the government's internal investigation report released over a year later, and only after a journalist filed an open records request to get it said that the prison doctor never bothered to see him. it says that the nurses did not follow the doctor's instructions. the immigration prisons are the places where the government, where our government, where we , the people oversee suffering. where the quality of life suffers and indeed, where at times life goes to end. and for those reasons, i think i conclude in my migrating to prison that immigration prisons are not defendable. in this book, i trace how the us at one point in its history actually shut down its immigration prisons and how for the 25 years after that, life went on without them. and then i described how starting in the late 1970s , the united states built the largest immigration prison system in the world. today, the united states locks up roughly half 1 million people every single year because the government thinks that they have violated immigration law. in immigration prisons, there are people are being held there under the power of civil law because the government says that they might not belong here. and there are people who are held there under the power of criminal law because the government once to punish them for having come here. today, immigration prisons are everywhere and they take just about every form, from an old motel down in tucson to this concrete fortress in an industrial quarter of aurora just off of interstate 70, not too far from here and some people are there because the government wanted to strip them of the permission that they had to be here . take jerry armigo who i spoke to when writing this book. jerry was raised in south texas not far from where i grew up and we were both born in thispoor, predominantly mexican community . only i was born north of the rio grande river and he was born on its southern side which means that i was born as a us citizen and he was not. and after high school i went off to college and after high school, jerry joined the army and got sent off to iraq. so i was shocked by a different culture. and he was shocked by exploding bombs. and when he returned to south texas to recover from those injuries, he didn't get the support he needed so he fell into drugs, and eventually into the criminal justice system and one day i picked him up and send him to an immigration prison with the goal of deporting him. one bomb, a shoddy mental health system and a few bad decisions and all of a sudden jerry transformed from war hero to criminal alien. so others are locked up because they dared to seek safety in the united states. federal law is really quite clear that anyone who is physically present in the united states can ask for asylum here. itdoes not matter where you came from . it does not matter how you got here. and yet, come into the united states without the permission of the federal government is also a federal crime. and this is why in the summer of 2018, we saw federal officials taking parents away from their children. and kids were sent off to places like that old motel in tucson that's surrounded by tall fences and it's monitored by 24 seven security cameras. and at the same time the parents were being prosecuted criminally in federal courts in places like mcallen where i grew up. before them, and since then , kids have been confined with their parents, kids like diego soria rivera. when he was just one-year-old , diego and his mother wendy decided that life in honduras was too dangerous for them to stay. a lot people from all overthe world have done , for generations, diego and wendy turned to the united states for safety. and when they got here asked for asylum. within a few days they found themselves in an old nursing home outside of philadelphia from which they could not leave . ice calls it a family residentialsector . critics call it a baby jail. diego and wendy were stuck inside an old nursing home turnedprison , waiting for the legal process to slowly grind forward. one year old when he arrived, diego was three by the time he got out and eventually did win his legal case to stay in the united states, but not before 650 nights had passed. i tell the story of diego in the book, and i tell the stories of many other migrants who are caught up in the immigration prison system. but in the book, i make the case that immigration prisons are not just inhumane and immoral. i make the case that they've also been created to serve that most of us cannot imagine and do not condone. they're not keeping us safe. they are not promoting justice and immigration prisons are not about enforcing the law. instead, they are about electing politicians and they are about fueling the pockets of five it prison corporations and rural economies and these are not reasons to lock up anyone. so to give you more context about this i want to read from a couple of pages from the book and a passage that i think helps illustrate the political motivations, political rationale for which that gives us these prisons these days. so let me take us back to 2014, obama administration and in a primetime immigration speech on november 20 2014, president obama explained that his administration, immigration enforcement priorities target felons, not families. terminals, not children. gang members, not a mom who is working hard toprovide for her kids, the president said . resident obama's dissertation is as good an example of resident trumps trite comment about targeting bad hombres and i strive to mimic his pronunciation but i can't area both of these formulations simplify complex human beings. felons are part of families. just like one persons bad hombre might be another's father. it hurts that he was trying to be a dad and he can't. cecilia said about her father, locked up for returning to the united states to reunite with his kids . the easy soundbite makes for politically useful talking points, but they are a lousy basis for public policy. the shifting sands of the political debate about which migrants deserve to live freely in the united states and which don't expose the pernicious edge of sorting the good from the bad. listen to most elected officials talk about immigration and one commonality weekly becomes obvious. everyone, it seems, wants to lock up and deport criminals. president clinton signed law that made it easier to stick landon immigration prison and harder to get out. his successor inaugurated the era of hard-line criminal prosecution of violators. president obama and his top immigration officials. they claimed to focus their resources on so-called criminal aliens and oversaw the largest immigration prison population in history until then. the trump administration has not differed and in its first week as president donald trump signed an executive order declaring aliens who engage in criminal conduct in the united states can be particularly significant threats to national security and public safety. despite the consistent bipartisanship of tarring migrants who have committed a crime, it's impossible to sort thegood from the bad consistently . obama's felons not families remark categorized people into boxes. family members on the one hand and criminals on the other. trump uses 2 different categories, law-abiding citizens almost always depicted as white and migrants almost exclusively not white. both categories are our convenient rhetorical ploys that make for good soundbites but neither can be defended logically. the criminals obama derided are also family members. families include criminals and criminals have families. lots of crime in fact is committed against family members. politicians and pundits inclined to dislike margaret migrants have a sharp eye for their own mistakes. when i police pinned a murder on an unauthorized immigrant from mexico, trump stood in front of the camera and complained we have tremendous crime trying to come through the borders and in trumps view crime, not people cross the border. by contrast, president obama was the opposite of trumps crudeness and callousness, still the obama administration heavily publicized its policy of targeting migrants with criminal histories while going easy on people who avoided blemishes . even the daca program was off-limits to people who have can committed some crime. trumps comments are cruder than the obama administration policy but both examples it into abroader bipartisan political pattern . migrants are expected to be innocent. if they are not, they stop being in the good graces of policymakers and the laws that they make. we love our victims innocent, writes the philosopher martin dole are, we empathize with them as long as they appear to be innocent but the moment they display some trait that is notentirely amiable , their sympathy is cut short. for us citizens, blemishes are to be expected because humans are imperfect creatures. we mess up. president trump expressed support for his campaign chairman paul manafort who admitted to lying to the fbi. he pardoned his supporter george violet who was convicted of disobeying court orders but he regularly hearts on about the dangers migrants pose and comes tothe aliens who migrate to the united states , blemishes are red flags that citizens should be wary.the political rationale or imprisonment is, we can find out in republican comments, we can find it in the positions of democrats, even liberal democrats like president obama but it's not just aboutpolitics . this is also a story about business. for private businesses and local governments immigration prisons are an attractive financial spigot . in oneyear alone , congress spent about 10.7 billion dollars on an ice detention system, the two largest private prison corporations in the united states, the geo group get about 50 percent of their revenue from the federal government and with that they hire people, often in out-of-the-way locations where decent paying jobs are hard to come by so to elected officials, a threat to their high employment in prison is a threat to their reelect