Immigration detention centers as torturing environments: Ethical reckonings, radical refusals, and implications for a psychology of resistance.

Abstract

This paper examines psychologists' ethical dilemmas in immigration detention centers. Using critical psychology, border, and detention scholarship, it highlights psychologists' historical complicity in state violence, from the U.S. Enhanced Interrogation Program to current border regimes. We argue that the structural conditions of migrant detention, characterized by profound dehumanization and harm, make ethical psychological practice in these torturing environments impossible. We analyzed the APA Ethics Code guidance, including reforms addressing past abuses and revisions focusing on human rights, social justice, and systemic accountability. Using our research, activism, and other evidence, we examine various psychologist responses to the torturous violence in detention operations. We contend that existing ethical frameworks remain inadequate for navigating the constitutive harms of carceral border systems. Using a post-conventional ethical framework, we call for a liberation-oriented psychological praxis that, grounded in an ethos of radical refusals and healing justice, resists complicity, rejects neutrality, and speaks truth to power to interrupt systems of violence. This is what we call a psychology of resistance. We argue that psychologists have an ethical duty to engage in transformative and liberatory efforts, including detention abolition, and contribute to collective struggles for everyone's freedom to move, to stay and to breathe.