Permanent Injury Beyond Medical Intervention: Disguising Death in U.S. Immigrant Detention

Between 2003-2015 over 150 deaths occurred across public and private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities. The additional deaths in 2018 of migrant children under ICE custody have come to question the exact daily operations of ICE by immigration activists across the globe. Despite these fatal conditions, immigrant detention facilities routinely pass federal audits and are rarely held accountable for their deficiencies. We analyze qualitative and quantitative data obtained through Freedom of Information Request (FOIR) that include 5 years of data (2008-2012) across 116 of the largest ICE detention facilities. Looking specifically at 106 immigration detention contracts and 181 office of detention oversight audits, we conclude that ICE creates a framework of obscurity around troubling conditions to disavow the agency from responsibility for administrative detainee’s deaths and poor health. These frames, legitimacy through documentation, benevolent dictatorship, and the detainee as a self-serving opportunist, allow ICE to reinforce the legitimacy of the immigrant detention network despite the awful conditions creating a potential human rights crisis. Our analysis also demonstrates how immigration detention facilities fortify structural legitimacy to continue intergovernmental service agreements with providers despite poor performance reviews. Specifically, phrases such as Permanent Injury Beyond Medical Intervention are used as key mechanisms of obscurity in the failure of medical services, emergency medical service, transfer of custody, and suicide prevention. The vague and generic terminology of Permanent Injury Beyond Medical Intervention serves to protect the interests of the immigrant detention center at the expense of detainees especially in cases of death. After providing background and descriptive on immigrant detention facilities, we construct a theoretical framework to explain the intersections of race and legal violence. Then, we offer three different conceptual frames to show how ICE operators make sense of negligence and deficiency.