UC Riverside

How are ghosts always already subjects that continue to speak after death? What do they say about the violence that has occurred? ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies develops a haunting methodology to investigate how gendered and queered migrants inside ICE detention use “haunted-ness” and place- making to unsettle detention. The locus of analysis for this dissertation is the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, located in San Bernardino County, where I have supported incarcerated migrants and organized against the expanding migrant detention apparatus in the region for over six years. My dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary framework that draws from immigration studies and Black feminist theory to illuminate how incarcerated migrants refuse and resist the historical, discursive, and epistemic erasure of gendered violence in immigrant detention centers. In doing so, ICE on Fire contextualizes migrant people’s refusals within the state’s active destruction of the recent, living historical archive of gendered carceral state violence in suburban prison towns like Adelanto.

To tell this story, ICE on Fire interweaves personal narrative, archival research, and interviews to inform a poetic critical speculative writing practice throughout each chapter. It initiates a critique of crimmigration theories to conceptualize an alternative theory of a “prison/border state,” which argues that prisons and borders are parallel logics integral to nation-state making and, as such, ICE migrant detention centers are the site where prisons and the U.S.- Mexico border collide. Concurrently, it turns to the Inland Empire’s activist migrant community to demonstrate how an “abolition geography” is always simultaneously created against the prison/border state. Further, ICE on Fire critically brings into crisis feminist reforms (such as the Violence Against Women Act) to illustrate how the prison/border archive aims to conceal and obscure sexual violence through a false veil of accountability. Instead, it urges that ICE detention is rooted in anti-Blackness and sexual violence which cannot be reformed and, therefore, must be abolished. Together, it exhibits how migrant activists alongside incarcerated people in the Inland Empire collectively organize against carceral sexual violence and desecration of land, all while moving us towards migrant freedom.