In Plain Sight: Documenting Immigration Detention in Canada

Abstract

In December 2013, Lucia Jimenez was caught paying less than the full fare for a public transit ticket. An undocumented Mexican national, Jimenez was taken into custody by the Canadian Border Services Agency. She hanged herself shortly thereafter. Following Jimenez’s death, a friend argued, “Lucia ended up being a ghost here.” Like so many non-status migrants for whom banal daily rituals—like accessing public transit—are dangerous, Jimenez practiced a necessary invisibility. But it wasn’t until her undocumented status came to light that she really disappeared: she entered the state’s “apparatus of disappearance, and vanished in plain sight” (Nield). Given the technologies of surveillance at work in detention facilities, it seems counterintuitive to constitute them as places where one can vanish, but such is the case in Canada, where there is no upper limit on the length of immigration detention. Tings Chak takes up these issues in her 2015 graphic essay, Undocumented: the Architecture of Migrant Detention, arguing that there is a pressing need “to make visible the sites and stories of detention.” With attention to Chak’s book and to the circumstances surrounding Jimenez’s death, this essay takes up the call to instigate a public conversation about immigration detention in Canada.

Punishing Survivors and Criminalizing Survivorship: A Feminist Intersectional Approach to Migrant Justice in the Crimmigration System

“…On the day before Lucía was scheduled to be deported, she attempted suicide in an airport detention facility monitored by a private-security firm with no training in trauma-informed crisis response (Burgmann, 2014;Dawson, 2016). At the time of Lucía's attempted suicide in the facility, there was also no female officer on duty, and officers had received no training in providing trauma-informed crisis response (outside of basic first aid and training in how to handcuff and detain prisoners).…”

“…Lucía was subsequently held in immigration detention for 19 days, the majority of which she spent in prison -a controversial practice given that immigration detention is supposed to be administrative in nature and not punitive (Global Detention Project, 2012;Amnesty International, 2015; United Nations Committee on Human Rights, 2015). On the day before Lucía was scheduled to be deported, she attempted suicide in an airport detention facility monitored by a private-security firm with no training in trauma-informed crisis response (Burgmann, 2014;Dawson, 2016). Lucía later died in hospital, although news of her death was not made public until one month after she passed, when a journalist caught wind of the case and began asking questions (Dyck, 2015).…”

In Defence of Invisiblized Noncitizens: Seeking Justice in the Canadian Immigration Detention System

“…With a particular focus on the quasi-judicial proceeding of detention review hearings, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which noncitizens have severely limited access to justice that would allow them "to participate competently and confidently in the legal system of Canada" (Silverman & Molnar, 2016: 111). This process renders them invisible in ways beyond their physical separation from the public (Dawson, 2016;Hernández, 2014). I will expand on Silverman and Molnar's (2016) research that demonstrates how "failure is hardwired" in the current detention regime, complementing their study with an ethnographic account of detention reviews, and qualitative interviews with legal counsel and former immigration detainees.…”