American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons

Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades.
In American Gulag, prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions.
Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be read by all Americans. It is a book that will change the way we see our country.
American Gulag takes us inside prisons such as the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the Corrections Corporation of America's Houston Processing Center, and county jails around the country that profit from contracts to hold INS prisoners. It contains disturbing in-depth profiles of detainees, including Emmy Kutesa, a defector from the Ugandan army who was tortured and then escaped to the United States, where he was imprisoned in Queens, and then undertook a hunger strike in protest. To provide a framework for understanding stories like these, Dow gives a brief history of immigration laws and practices in the United States—including the repercussions of September 11 and present-day policies. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority.
American Gulag exposes the full story of a cruel prison system that is operating today with an astonishing lack of accountability.

"Prisoners who have had no trial, guards who humiliate and assault them: It sounds like a scene from Stalin's U.S.S.R., but it is a reality in the United States today. American Gulag tells the horrifying story of men, women and children detained indefinitely by U.S. immigration officials as it has never been told before. It sounds an alarm for us all."—Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon's Trumpet

"Through the eyes and ears of immigration prisoners, their lawyers, and their jailers, Mark Dow sheds light on the netherworld of immigration detention, and compels us to confront how we treat the most vulnerable and voiceless among us. His work is a clarion call for justice from behind bars by those who have been sentenced to serve time without having ever committed a crime." David Cole, author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism

The New Yorker

Long before Abu Ghraib, and even before September 11th, detainees in America’s immigration prisons were being stripped, beaten, and sexually abused. Dow has spent years interviewing inmates, guards, and officials, and he gives a jarring account of a dangerously arbitrary system. Alien inmates—from political refugees who present themselves at airports to permanent residents convicted of misdemeanors—can be locked up for years, in harsh conditions, with no real recourse. Dow argues that the practices of the I.N.S. (which was folded into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003) laid the groundwork for the indefinite detentions and the muting of civil liberties after September 11th. By “blurring the distinction between alien, criminal, and terrorist,” detention takes on its own brutal logic. After a Somali man is left to bake in the sun in a sealed car to discourage others from applying for asylum, an immigration official explains, “I’m not trying to prosecute them. I just want them to quit coming here.”

Mark Dow is a freelance writer and poet whose work has appeared in the Miami Herald, The Progressive, Boston Review,
Index on Censorship, Prison Legal News, and numerous literary publications. He is coeditor of Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime (2002).