Notions of the unwanted “other,” the “illegal” migrant, and the “bogus” refugee are increasingly prominent in public discourse, lending support to stringent border control policies whereby states are increasingly relying upon the use of detention to control the movement of foreigners. The detrimental impact of these trends on the health and wellbeing of migrants and […]
Advocacy Strategy
Challenging Immigration Detention: Academics, Activists, and Policy-makers
Governments increasingly rely upon detention to control the movement of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Approaching detention from an interdisciplinary perspective, this new edited volume brings together leading writers and thinkers to provide a greater understanding of why it is such an important social phenomenon and suggest ways to confront it locally and globally. […]

Spatial Control: Geographical Approaches to the Study of Immigration Detention – Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 24
This paper surveys research on immigration detention conducted using geographical methods, highlighting how geography’s conceptualization of detention as a form of spatial control offers tools to scholars and activists working to contest this form of immigration control. […]

Putting Immigration Detention in Interdisciplinary Perspective
What can we learn from the interdisciplinary study of immigration detention regimes? Michael Flynn explains in this essay for Oxford University’s “Border Criminologies” research network. […]

Measuring and gathering data on immigration detention
Mariette Grange to give a workshop titled “Measuring and gathering data on immigration detention,” at the European Network on Statelessness Conference Protecting Stateless Persons From Arbitrary Detention, held in Budapest, Hungary, 4-5 May 2017. […]

Tracking Immigration Detention Data Globally: An Introduction to the Global Detention Project Online Database
The Global Detention Project is pleased to announce that it will be co-hosting a parallel event at the upcoming session of the UN Human Rights Council at which we will present the GDP’s new website and online database. The event, titled “Tracking Immigration Detention Data Globally: An Introduction to the Global Detention Project Online Database,” […]

Children in Immigration Detention: Challenges of Measurement and Definition
The campaign to end the detention of children, including child migrants and asylum seekers, has generated impressive global momentum. However, there remain important gaps in this effort, including the absence of an adequate definition of the immigration detention of children and inherent problems in developing realistic statistics to measure state activities. The objective of this […]

Does making immigration detention more humane make it more widespread?
Online debate between Michael Flynn (Global Detention Projecy) and Michelle Brané (Women’s Refugee Commission) over the strategies for countering the growth of immigration detention. Read entire debate here. […]