Geostrategic Discourse
In the context of this regime, detention operates as a spatial strategy of containment and forced mobility imposed by federal immigration officials on noncitizens. Visually containing actual noncitizen bodies and the symbolic problem of “illegal immigration,” detention broadcasts state power in action.
This is particularly important for legitimating the newly formed Department of Homeland Security’s legitimation and the federal government’s ability to secure US borders after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (Mountz 2010; Gill 2009). Thus, the spatial practices of enforcement are critically linked to broader narratives of insecurity/security (Coleman 2009). Making “explicit claims about the material national security interests of the state across a world map characterized by state competition, threats and dangers,” this geostrategic thinking bases its claims in “transcendent national interests and existential security concerns” (C) Tuathail 2003, p. 95). In Bunikyte, in particular, ICE and the federal judge linked “security vulnerabilities” to children’s “special vulnerability,” and “national interests in enforcing immigration law” to “children’s best interests,” suturing child and national protection together in ways that have little to do with the material well-being of the children detained at Hutto. To flesh out how this “geopolitics of vulnerability” displaces insecurity from US territory onto asylum-seeking and migrating families, the chapter reviews how federal actors deployed abstract, universalizing, and global discourses of vulnerability, threat, and sovereign right to marginalize the cases of 26 individual noncitizen child plaintiffs.6
Source:
Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p.. 2017
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