Fighting Border Control in Three Sites of Confinement: Contestation and Visibility in Prison, Immigration Detention and Under Digital Confinement in New York

Borders come into existence within nation-states in multiple spaces including prisons, detention centers and through forms of digital confinement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and biographical interviews with foreign-nationals facing deportation from the USA, this contribution focuses on the possibilities of contestation of deportation and conditions of detention in three spaces of confinement: prison, immigration detention and the use of electronic monitoring for border control purposes in the New York Metropolitan Area. The focus is different from previous work on the links between resistance in prison and in penalized neighborhoods on the one hand, and the strategies of invisibility of undocumented migrants on the other, with its attention to modes of visibility and publicity as strategies to subvert border control and contest deportation. It specifically analyzes the ways in which forms of resistance to the border developed in institutions of confinement can be turned into larger public transcripts of protest, through alliances with citizens and engagements in public arenas that lay outside of prisons and detention centers. These mobilizations are reinforced but sometimes also weakened through strategies of visibility, especially with the reconfigurations of activism through social media and the developments of forms of digital confinement and surveillance.