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Part 3, Chapter 6: Detained
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dear America, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Citizenship, Belonging, and Identity
Family, Love, and Intimacy
Immigration Politics and Policy
Journalism, Storytelling, and the Power of Truth
Summary
Analysis
Vargas ended up in jail because the U.S.’s complex immigration enforcement apparatus swept him up. After 9/11, the Bush administration publicly linked immigration to terrorism, founded the DHS, and ramped up border security. But the modern era of border enforcement really started in the mid-1990s, as part of the “tough on crime” policies pushed by state Republicans and President Clinton.
Many Americans view border security as a natural and inevitable part of U.S. politics. In other words, they know that border security exists, but they don’t question why it exists, where it came from, or whether it ought to exist at all. In this brief chapter, Vargas covers the recent history of border security in order to answer all these questions. He aims to show his readers that the U.S. is actively choosing to cause pain, suffering, and death at the border—and can also actively choose to stop it.
Themes
In 1996, President Clinton signed two key bills that transformed the immigration system: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. These bills expanded the number of immigrants eligible for deportation, eliminated the process that let undocumented people legalize their status, and created an “expedited removal” process that let agents deport immigrants without due process. These acts also prevented many undocumented people from getting green cards through legal means, like marriage, and barred undocumented immigrants from reentering the country for many years after they leave.
These bipartisan bills are largely responsible for the cruel, punitive immigration system in the United States today. (That said, they were just two in a longer series of similar bills since the 1960s.) The underlying motive behind this legislation was the same anti-immigrant sentiment that Vargas remembers seeing all around him in the mid-1990s. Thus, the U.S.’s closed-off, militarized immigration system is actually a very recent invention—many Americans can remember a time before it was normal for the government to deport people without due process. Contrary to what conservative media claims, activists like Vargas don’t want to open the border to an unprecedented flood of new immigrants—instead, the system they are proposing is very similar to ones that have already existed in the past.
Themes
Since the 1990s, the government has also ramped up immigration detention, including for asylum seekers and immigrants formerly convicted of very minor offenses. They are often held in for-profit facilities, and the Obama administration has even put a minimum quota on the number of immigrants who must be detained. In fact, Obama also ramped up deportations to a high of 400,000 per year, seven times as many as during the 1990s. This has cost more than a hundred billion dollars just since 9/11, and it has turned Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into the U.S.’s largest police agency. Vargas asks what this is all for: who are they protecting Americans from?
Clinton and Obama’s immigration policies show that Democratic politicians don’t necessarily serve immigrants’ best interests, even though the Democrats are generally considered the pro-immigration party in the U.S.’s highly polarized system. While noting how both parties race to ramp up immigration enforcement, which they treat as a security issue, Vargas also points out that there’s no obvious need for this enforcement in the first place. If immigrants aren’t actually a security threat to the U.S., then why do they get treated that way? Whose interests does this serve? While Vargas doesn’t answer this question outright, he strongly implies that anti-immigration policy isn’t really about protecting Americans’ safety—but rather about white Americans trying to maintain cultural dominance.
Themes
