Please join for a full-day Symposium on "Elizabeth Detention Center: Past, Present, and Future." The symposium will take place on October 27, 2023, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM in the Collaborative Learning Center at the Livingston Student Center, Rutgers-New Brunswick. The event will be followed by a food/wine reception in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies in Lucy Stone Hall.
As you most likely know, Gov. Murphy signed into law a bill in 2021 that barred county and privately run jails from entering into, renewing, or extending already existing agreements with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, ICE. This bill was a historic win for immigrant advocates in the state and led to the end of immigration detention in NJ’s county jails. However, the private prison company CoreCivic operating at Elizabeth Detention Center was quick to sue the state of New Jersey for its anti-detention laws. At the end of August 2023, a federal judge in Trenton granted summary judgment to CoreCivic in their lawsuit against NJ’s immigration detention ban. It is uncertain at the moment what will happen to Elizabeth Detention Center - the only remaining ICE detention center in New Jersey - and how the future of detention in the state will unfold.
This symposium program features the perspectives of scholars, advocates, attorneys, policymakers, and migrants and asylum seekers formerly detained in EDC to shed light on this urgent and timely social and racial justice issue. The symposium is organized by Ulla D. Berg (LCS/Anthropology) and Carolina Sanchez Boe (Aarhus University, Denmark/Université de Paris, France) in collaboration with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), First Friends of NJ and NY, Rutgers Law School, and Detention Watch Network. The event is supported by the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, the School of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ), the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the Latino Oral History Project (LOHP), the Department of Sociology, the Department of Anthropology, and the Program in Criminal Justice.
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Please join for a book talk with Janice Gallagher, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark, to discuss her new book.
Since 2006, more than 85,000 people have disappeared in Mexico. Disappeared people are rarely found, and the Mexican state almost never investigates or prosecutes those responsible. Despite this, people not only continue to report disappearances, but many devote their lives to answering the question, “Where are they?” In Bootstrap Justice, Janice Gallagher leverages over a decade of ethnographic research to explain what enables the sustained mobilization of family members of the disappeared and analyze how configurations of political power between state and criminal actors shape what is possible for them to achieve. Following three families whose lives have been upended by the disappearance of their loved ones, Bootstrap Justice offers a unique window into how citizens respond to weak and corrupt institutions.
