A practicing immigration lawyer and professor of law at the University of Denver, García Hernández is a pioneering scholar in the new field of “crimmigration,” which operates at the juncture of criminal and immigration law. Unknown some thirty years ago, the field has grown in recent decades alongside the practice of incarcerating people for violating immigration laws. In his revelatory book, he looks at the trend’s origins in the 1980s, when it was deployed most heavily against Latinos, explores the outsize role of private prisons in the matter, and examines the political use of the myth linking immigration to national security threats. Interweaving stories of some of the 400,000 people detained annually for immigration violations, Hernández makes a powerful case for ending immigration prisons.
