An intimate look at the people ensnared by the united states detention and deportation program, the biggest in the world

On a bright Phoenix morning hours, Elena Santiago opened her door to discover her house surrounded by a platoon of federal government immigration agents. Her children screamed as the officials handcuffed her and drove her away. Within hours, she was deported towards the tough border city of Nogales, Sonora, with only the clothes on her behalf back again. Her two-year-old little girl and fifteen-year-old child, about Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fireplace both Americans, were taken by the state of Az and consigned to foster treatment. Their mother’s only offense: living undocumented in the United States.

Immigrants like Elena, who’ve lived in america for a long time, are getting detained and deported at unparalleled rates. Hundreds languish in detention centers-often torn off their families-for weeks as well as years. Deportees are returned to violent Central American nations or unceremoniously lowered off in harmful Mexican border towns. Regardless of the dangers of the desert crossing, many immigrants will slide across the border again, preventing at nothing to get home to their kids.

Drawing on many years of reporting in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, journalist Margaret Regan tells their poignant stories. Inside the massive Eloy Detention Center, a for-profit personal prison in Arizona, she matches detainee Yolanda Fontes, a mom separated from her three small children. Inside a Nogales soup kitchen, deportee Gustavo Sanchez, a father who’d resided in Phoenix since the age of eight, agonizes about the risks of the journey back.

Regan demonstrates how progressively draconian detention and deportation policies have broadened law enforcement capabilities, while enriching a private prison industry whose profits derive from individual struggling. She also papers the rise of level of resistance, profiling activists and youthful immigrant “Dreamers” who are fighting for the rights of the undocumented.

Convincing and heart-wrenching, Detained and Deported presents a rare glimpse into the lives of individuals ensnared in America’s immigration dragnet.