Episode 19: Profiting From Detention and the Criminalization of Immigration with Anthony Enriquez

In episode 19 of Art of Citizenry Podcast, Manpreet is joined by Anthony Enriquez, the VP of U.S. Advocacy and Litigation at RFK Human Rights. Together, they discuss the complexities of immigration detention in the U.S., focusing on the financial motivations behind privatized detention centers, the historical shifts in immigration policy, and the role of race in shaping these policies. Anthony highlights the significant abuses occurring in detention centers and the need for advocacy and reform to address these issues. This conversation delves into the complex issues surrounding immigration detention centers, their economic impact on local communities, the evolving political narratives around immigration, and the structural challenges within immigration policy. It highlights the importance of local advocacy and the need for oversight and accountability in immigration detention practices, emphasizing the role of community-led movements in shaping a more just immigration system.

Meet Our Guest

Anthony Enriquez, Vice President of U.S. Advocacy and Litigation, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights

Anthony is an attorney working to reduce mass incarceration in the United States by exposing and stopping human rights abuses in the criminal legal and immigration systems. As the Vice President of U.S. Advocacy and Litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, he leads a team of advocates fighting in U.S. courts and international human rights mechanisms in solidarity with grassroots campaigns for accountability for state-sponsored racial discrimination, torture, and extrajudicial killings.

The U.S. Advocacy and Litigation Program at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights partners with grassroots human rights defenders to reduce the size and power of mass incarceration in the United States. We expose and stop racial discrimination, extrajudicial killings, and torture in the U.S. criminal and immigration legal systems and advocate for long-term solutions that will guarantee everyone's human rights.

The Creation of Borders

Borders are lines drawn by empires, cutting through ethnic groups, indigenous lands, and without consideration of those already living within them. A border is not simply a line on a map or where one nation ends and another begins—it’s a wall, a checkpoint, a detention center. It’s where law enforcement undermines human dignity, criminalizing movement, and making freedom contingent upon documents and citizenship status. The border is where capital flows freely, but people are stopped and detained. 

Immigration policy is where the violence of borders becomes most visible, transforming arbitrary lines into instruments of exclusion. These policies are not neutral—they are deliberate mechanisms of state power, designed to criminalize movement and enforce global hierarchies. Immigration systems categorize people — citizens, immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented — assigning worth based on economic utility, geopolitical interests, and racialized assumptions about who belongs and who does not. They justify the detention, deportation, and rejections of individuals and families by enforcing who can cross and under what terms. To challenge these policies is to confront the broader system of Nation States itself, to ask why movement is policed while the forces of displacement are left unchecked.

The Historical Construct of “Illegal” Immigration

Until the late 19th century, the concept of "illegal" or "legal" immigration to the United States didn’t exist—because for immigration to be considered illegal, there must first be laws governing it. Immigration to the United States began in the late 1700s, following independence. Before this, Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas as enslaved people, while Europeans arrived as settlers. Unlike immigrants, who adhere to the laws of the land they enter, settlers disrupt existing systems to impose their own. By the mid- to late-19th century, people from southern and eastern Europe as well as China began to arrive. The first federal law governing which immigrants could and could not enter the U.S. was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In the late 1880s, many Chinese immigrants began entering the United States through Mexico after Canada implemented a tax on Chinese immigration. This shift prompted U.S. immigration officials to increasingly focus on the U.S.-Mexico border as a key point for screening and determining individuals’ eligibility to enter the country. 

At that time, there was little effort to prevent Mexican migration to the United States until the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. As many began fleeing the conflict and immigrating to the U.S., militias formed to deter them, including the Texas Rangers, which is still functioning as an organized military force. In 1924, the U.S. created the Border Patrol, a federally armed force dedicated to year-round border enforcement.

“Immigration detention is more than an immigrants' rights issue alone. The power we give to the U.S. government to inflict abuses on immigrants is inevitably used against citizens: from racial profiling to mass surveillance to prolonged civil detention and even deportation itself. The public funds we use to transform rural economies into private prison towns could have been used for investments in small businesses, manufacturing, and vocational and educational training instead of multi-million-dollar CEO salaries.”

Take Action

At this moment the safety of many is under threat. With much uncertainty, members of our communities are living in fear of what lies ahead. The current administration is attempting to fast-track deportations without due process and have already passed a series of executive orders that further push hardline immigration policies and threaten Constitutional rights. Moments like this demand our action. Now is the time to support the efforts of local grassroots organizations and immigration legal services. Also, take a moment to know your rights – regardless of immigration status, you have rights under the U.S. Constitution. 

Image courtesy of La Resistencia, taken during the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) visit to Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington.

Resources

References

Grassroots Organizations

  • La Resistencia is a grassroots organization led by undocumented immigrants and people of color who have been oppressed by the immigration enforcement system in Washington State.

  • Global Rights Advocacy offers access to international human rights mechanisms through representation, reporting and education. 

  • Detention Watch Network brings together advocates to unify strategy, build partnerships and strengthen the movement to end immigration detention.

  • Tsuru for Solidarity is a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites and support front-line immigrant and refugee communities.

  • Southeast Dignity Not Detention is a coalition composed of over 20 organizations in Louisiana with the goal to shut down all immigration detention centers.

  • Justice for Migrant Families is a nonprofit agency that promotes justice for migrant families by providing support to individuals in the federal detention facility in Batavia, information and resources to families in the community, and advocacy both within and beyond the local community.

  • South Brooklyn Sanctuary empowers New Yorkers to represent themselves in immigration court.

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Manpreet Kalra