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Detention Empire: Reagan's War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance
The early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of modern mass incarceration in the United States. The Mariel Cuban migration of 1980, alongside increasing arrivals of Haitian and Central American asylum-seekers, galvanized new modes of covert warfare in the Reagan administration's globalized War on Drugs. Using newly available government documents, Shull demonstrates how migrant detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency at the intersections of US war-making and domestic carceral trends. As the Reagan administration developed retaliatory enforcement measures to target a racialized specter of mass migration, it laid the foundations of new forms of carceral and imperial expansion.
Reagan's war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on critical refugee studies, community archives, protest artifacts, and oral histories, Detention Empire also shows how migrants resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and allies on the outside—including legal advocates, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary movements—organized hunger strikes, caravans, and prison uprisings to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to US empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis, reckoning with these histories takes on new urgency.
Reagan's war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Drawing on critical refugee studies, community archives, protest artifacts, and oral histories, Detention Empire also shows how migrants resisted state repression at every turn. People in detention and allies on the outside—including legal advocates, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and the Central American peace and Sanctuary movements—organized hunger strikes, caravans, and prison uprisings to counter the silencing effects of incarceration and speak truth to US empire. As the United States remains committed to shoring up its borders in an era of unprecedented migration and climate crisis, reckoning with these histories takes on new urgency.
- GenresNonfiction
518 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 30, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 13, 2024
“Carter Caused a Problem, but Reagan Made It Worse”
Kristina Shull and I got off on the wrong foot. She picked a fight by showing animosity toward Ronald Reagan, while I have a generally favorable attitude toward the former President. Her introduction was "over-the-top" polemical and shoved me into a state of irritation as a reader from the outset. Had this not been a required reading, I would not have ventured past the introduction.
While I had issues with the book's style, the most significant problems are its presuppositions and statements of facts not in evidence. Shull repeatedly characterized Reagan administration policies as xenophobic (65), state-sponsored terror (6), anti-Blackness (27), homophobic (32), and using dog whistles (8). She offered no evidence for these pejoratives, presuming that polite society agrees with her opinion of Reagan in particular and conservatives in general. Her "dog whistle" assertion is, by definition, counterfactual - an unprovable phenomenon whose active ingredient is innuendo.
These pejorative foundations served as the basis for her arguments: the "Reagan imaginary" is a vision and strategy of white nationalist state-making" (1), the United States covert foreign policy instigated political rebellion in the "Global South" which caused mass migration (21), and detention of migrants was a form of counterinsurgent warfare (184). She asserted that the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees while concurrently denying entrance to Haitian asylum seekers exemplified the anti-Black, racist policy of the Reagan administration (27). First of all, she tagged Reagan with policies instituted by previous administrations. Secondly, since both the Vietnamese and Haitians were people of color, her assertion seems invalid. Furthermore, the Vietnamese carried greater legitimacy with the US government due to the legacy of the Vietnam War, and it is reasonable to conclude that Haitians fled economic hardship more than political persecution.
Shull organized her narrative thematically and roughly in chronological order. The incendiary introduction enumerated the book's argument on page one and concluded with the standard literary device of previewing the upcoming chapters. The chapters subdivide into episodes demonstrating the chapter's theme, often separated by headers. Quotes from the episode constitute the titles of many headers. This practice is an effective literary device in framing the progression of the narrative. I also appreciated her practice of inserting pithy quotes below the title of each chapter.
Shull cherry-picked a large cache of primary sources to develop her thesis. She used newspaper articles, government documents, oral histories, campaign rhetoric, and memoirs to poignantly paint a picture of the human suffering experienced by migrants and the dilemmas of government officials trying to deal with them. Her arguments that the Reagan administration's policy of migrant exclusion and incarceration derived from racist and xenophobic motives ignored more plausible explanations, including enforcing existing federal immigration law, stewardship of state and federal resources, and minimizing disruption to electoral politics. Her narrative heavily weighted the plight of migrants, and she captured those tragedies well. Less balanced was her account of the collateral damage done by migrants, who were in the country illegally in many cases, to the neighborhoods and communities where they landed. Another of Shull's presuppositions seemed to be that migrants have a moral right to come to the United States, and the country has a moral obligation to receive them.
In Chapter One, Shull sets up her argument about the carceral palimpsest by evoking the episodes of Chinese exclusion in the 1880s and Jim Crow and convict leasing in the post-Reconstruction South (17). These examples connect directly with Lew-Williams's The Chinese Must Go and David Oshinsky's Worse than Slaver. From my reading, three monographs speak specifically to Shull's overall topic: Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, John Gaddis's Strategies of Containment, and Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights. She cites Hinton numerous times; however, Gaddis and Dudziak do not appear in the bibliography. These omitted secondary sources would have added nuance to the work.
I was surprised that Shull did not weave the Iran-Contra scandal into her narrative. Iran-Contra is usually the "go-to" episode for critics of the Reagan administration because it has bipartisan validity as a foreign policy blunder. Since the scandal involved selling arms to Iran in order to fund Sandanista rebels in Nicaragua, it seems to be on point for her argument that the US used covert military operations to foment insurrection in Central America, ergo creating the migrant crisis.
Most of the history covered in the book was familiar to me. I remember the Mariel boatlift and its dilatory effect on Jimmy Carter's popularity. I also have a general understanding of the Duvalier regimes in Haiti and the trans-Caribbean migration from the island during this period. The account of the Oakdale, Louisiana detention facility and riots was interesting news. My hometown in Mississippi is near Oakdale.
For me, Shull's book exemplifies what not to do as a history writer. My goal is to draw readers into the work so they are interested enough in the narrative to consider arguments with which they may initially disagree. The best path toward this goal is to be winsomely persuasive, not purposefully abrasive.
The parallels of this book with current events make for compelling contrasts. In both cases, immigration policy and enforcement were polarizing domestic political issues. Every administration since Carter has faced withering criticism of its handling of immigration, both legal and illegal. Shull criticized Reagan's policies of exclusion and mass incarceration. Biden is currently taking heat for an open border and "catch-and-release" by the Right. The Left brands Trump's policies as racist and xenophobic. Issues of immigration, nationalism, and borders will continue to consume domestic politics for the foreseeable future.
Kristina Shull and I got off on the wrong foot. She picked a fight by showing animosity toward Ronald Reagan, while I have a generally favorable attitude toward the former President. Her introduction was "over-the-top" polemical and shoved me into a state of irritation as a reader from the outset. Had this not been a required reading, I would not have ventured past the introduction.
While I had issues with the book's style, the most significant problems are its presuppositions and statements of facts not in evidence. Shull repeatedly characterized Reagan administration policies as xenophobic (65), state-sponsored terror (6), anti-Blackness (27), homophobic (32), and using dog whistles (8). She offered no evidence for these pejoratives, presuming that polite society agrees with her opinion of Reagan in particular and conservatives in general. Her "dog whistle" assertion is, by definition, counterfactual - an unprovable phenomenon whose active ingredient is innuendo.
These pejorative foundations served as the basis for her arguments: the "Reagan imaginary" is a vision and strategy of white nationalist state-making" (1), the United States covert foreign policy instigated political rebellion in the "Global South" which caused mass migration (21), and detention of migrants was a form of counterinsurgent warfare (184). She asserted that the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees while concurrently denying entrance to Haitian asylum seekers exemplified the anti-Black, racist policy of the Reagan administration (27). First of all, she tagged Reagan with policies instituted by previous administrations. Secondly, since both the Vietnamese and Haitians were people of color, her assertion seems invalid. Furthermore, the Vietnamese carried greater legitimacy with the US government due to the legacy of the Vietnam War, and it is reasonable to conclude that Haitians fled economic hardship more than political persecution.
Shull organized her narrative thematically and roughly in chronological order. The incendiary introduction enumerated the book's argument on page one and concluded with the standard literary device of previewing the upcoming chapters. The chapters subdivide into episodes demonstrating the chapter's theme, often separated by headers. Quotes from the episode constitute the titles of many headers. This practice is an effective literary device in framing the progression of the narrative. I also appreciated her practice of inserting pithy quotes below the title of each chapter.
Shull cherry-picked a large cache of primary sources to develop her thesis. She used newspaper articles, government documents, oral histories, campaign rhetoric, and memoirs to poignantly paint a picture of the human suffering experienced by migrants and the dilemmas of government officials trying to deal with them. Her arguments that the Reagan administration's policy of migrant exclusion and incarceration derived from racist and xenophobic motives ignored more plausible explanations, including enforcing existing federal immigration law, stewardship of state and federal resources, and minimizing disruption to electoral politics. Her narrative heavily weighted the plight of migrants, and she captured those tragedies well. Less balanced was her account of the collateral damage done by migrants, who were in the country illegally in many cases, to the neighborhoods and communities where they landed. Another of Shull's presuppositions seemed to be that migrants have a moral right to come to the United States, and the country has a moral obligation to receive them.
In Chapter One, Shull sets up her argument about the carceral palimpsest by evoking the episodes of Chinese exclusion in the 1880s and Jim Crow and convict leasing in the post-Reconstruction South (17). These examples connect directly with Lew-Williams's The Chinese Must Go and David Oshinsky's Worse than Slaver. From my reading, three monographs speak specifically to Shull's overall topic: Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, John Gaddis's Strategies of Containment, and Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights. She cites Hinton numerous times; however, Gaddis and Dudziak do not appear in the bibliography. These omitted secondary sources would have added nuance to the work.
I was surprised that Shull did not weave the Iran-Contra scandal into her narrative. Iran-Contra is usually the "go-to" episode for critics of the Reagan administration because it has bipartisan validity as a foreign policy blunder. Since the scandal involved selling arms to Iran in order to fund Sandanista rebels in Nicaragua, it seems to be on point for her argument that the US used covert military operations to foment insurrection in Central America, ergo creating the migrant crisis.
Most of the history covered in the book was familiar to me. I remember the Mariel boatlift and its dilatory effect on Jimmy Carter's popularity. I also have a general understanding of the Duvalier regimes in Haiti and the trans-Caribbean migration from the island during this period. The account of the Oakdale, Louisiana detention facility and riots was interesting news. My hometown in Mississippi is near Oakdale.
For me, Shull's book exemplifies what not to do as a history writer. My goal is to draw readers into the work so they are interested enough in the narrative to consider arguments with which they may initially disagree. The best path toward this goal is to be winsomely persuasive, not purposefully abrasive.
The parallels of this book with current events make for compelling contrasts. In both cases, immigration policy and enforcement were polarizing domestic political issues. Every administration since Carter has faced withering criticism of its handling of immigration, both legal and illegal. Shull criticized Reagan's policies of exclusion and mass incarceration. Biden is currently taking heat for an open border and "catch-and-release" by the Right. The Left brands Trump's policies as racist and xenophobic. Issues of immigration, nationalism, and borders will continue to consume domestic politics for the foreseeable future.
January 15, 2024
Liberal intersectional garbage at its finest. If you are looking for a non-biased (actual) historical work on the history of the US immigration system, find a different book.
If you are looking for pure liberal propaganda where typical anti-American buzzwords and phrases are nonsensically brought together to form unintelligible sentences, then this is for you. This is a perfect example of how academia today sacrifices true scholarship for political activism.
If you are looking for pure liberal propaganda where typical anti-American buzzwords and phrases are nonsensically brought together to form unintelligible sentences, then this is for you. This is a perfect example of how academia today sacrifices true scholarship for political activism.
November 15, 2025
Man this one took me awhile!!! This book has A LOT OF INFO! It’s a good read if you’re interested in the history of immigration through multiple presidential cabinets not just Reagan’s. It does focus on the Reagan administration’s changes to immigration, detention and prison system that has lead to where we are now.
August 7, 2023
read as a judge for the SECOLAS Thomas Book Award contest, 2022-2023
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews