Reinforcing the Detention System, 1994–2000

Haitian detention at Guantanamo Bay continued to focus attention on U.S. detention practice in 1995 as the government’s detention of hundreds of unaccompanied Haitian youth generated enormous controversy and loud calls for their freedom. Chapter 6 documents this struggle over child detention before it moves to an examination of two key pieces of legislation in 1996 that had a decisive impact on the history of immigration detention in the U.S. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) were measures that consummated the marriage of immigration restriction and mass incarceration, devastated immigrant communities, and led to an enormous expansion of the immigration detention system. Finally, chapter 6 illustrates what the immigration detention system had become by the late 1990s and how, despite the extraordinary power and cruelty of the system, detainees continued to exercise resistance.