Prologue: Detention Is Eugenics

The prologue briefly examines the relatively new practice of detaining migrants in for-profit detention centers in the United States through the lens of eugenics. Although attention to the sterilization of migrants has made it to mainstream news media, detention itself is also a form of reproductive injustice, one that affects migrants’ relationships with children, partners, families, and life-affirming care networks. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people in migrant detention has heightened these disruptions. The unnecessary exposure of people in migrant detention to a highly contagious and deadly respiratory virus is only the latest manifestation of what is theorized in this book as carceral eugenics.