Detained and Deported ─ Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire

An intimate look at the people ensnared by the US detention and deportation system, the largest in the world

The United States is detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants at an unprecedented rate. Thousands languish in immigration detention centers, separated from their families, sometimes for years. Deportees are dropped off unceremoniously in sometimes dangerous Mexican border towns or flown back to crime-ridden Central American nations. Many of the deported have lived here for years and have US-citizen children; despite the possibly dire consequences, many cross the border again.

Using volatile Arizona as a case study, journalist Margaret Regan conjures up the harshness of the detention centers hidden away in the countryside and travels to Mexico to report on the fate of deportees stranded far from their families in the United States. Drawing on Regan’s interviews with mothers and fathers locked up in detention or trapped on the other side of the border, Detained and Deported is a humanizing and rare glimpse into the lives of those caught up in the US immigration enforcement cycle. Giving special attention to the separation of families and the treatment of women, Regan demonstrates that increasingly draconian detention and deportation policies have broadened police powers and enriched an industry whose profits are derived from human incarceration.

Margaret Regan (Tucson, AZ) is arts editor and writer for the Tucson Weekly and the author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands (Beacon Press, 2010), a 2010 Southwest Book of the Year and a Common Read for the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. A longtime journalist in Arizona, Regan has won dozens of awards for her reporting and in 2013 was named winner of the Al Filipov Peace and Justice Award for her writing on immigration.