How subcontracting key services leads to the entrenchment of urban immigration detention in many us communities

The US federal government contracts with US local governments to provide immigration detention. In new research Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra find that these contracts generate substantial revenues for urban counties in New Jersey, and that county subcontracting for services such as food and medical care can also provide substantial revenues for local businesses. They write that the monetary benefits to counties alongside the potential negative effects for detainees of ending local immigration detention can further entrench the practice

Lidar and Deep Learning Reveal Forest Structural Controls on Snowpack

Forest structure has a strong relationship with abiotic components of the environment. For example, canopy morphology controls snow depth through interception and modifies incoming thermal radiation. In turn, snow water availability affects forest growth, carbon sequestration, and nutrient cycling. We investigated how structural diversity and topography affect snow depth patterns across scales. The study site, Grand Mesa, Colorado, is representative of many areas worldwide where declining snowpack and its consequences for forest ecosystems are increasingly an environmental concern. On the basis of a convolution neural network model (R2 of 0.64; root mean squared error of 0.13 m), we found that forest structural and topographic metrics from airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) at fine scales significantly influence snow depth during the accumulation season. Moreover, complex vertically arranged foliage intercepts more snow and results in shallower snow depths below the canopy. Assessing forest structural controls on snow distribution and depth will aid efforts to improve understanding of the ecological and hydrological impacts of changing snow patterns

Bare life in an immigration jail: technologies of surveillance in U.S. pre-deportation detention

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 29/08/2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1796266 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Migration policies globally are characterised by a growth in the use of detention. These dynamics have also been noted in the United States of America, where, increasingly, the private immigration detention infrastructure is the most developed in the world. Like other total institutions, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities depend on controlling human bodies. This article, which explains how nation-state sovereignty is created by means of surveillance technologies, draws upon the narratives of 26 Mexicans, deported under the administrations of Presidents Bush and Obama and interviewed in four waves of research between 2012 and 2019 in their hometown. The article describes the lived experience of biopolitical interventions on detainees’ bodies and explains the disciplining role of restricting or limiting access to ICTs. The article uses Agamben’s notion of bare life. It describes how biopolitical interventions and disciplines dehumanise precarious migrants and contribute to their governmentality long after their deportation when they abstain from re-entering the United States. The article complicates the notion of bare life by demonstrating that the use of biometrics (fingerprints) not only dehumanises people but also identifies their bodies and thus rehumanise them.Published onlin

The View From Ecuador: Security, Insecurity, and Chaotic Geographies of U.S. Migrant Detention and Deportation

The central argument of this dissertation is that while the immigration enforcement policies of detention and deportation are politically positioned as critical strategies for protecting U.S. homeland security, these policies actually create insecurity at multiple scales. The project, grounded in both critical geopolitics and feminist political geography, endeavors to interrogate the master narratives behind these restrictive policies. First, the dissertation explores the historical, political, and cultural factors behind the United States\u27 increased use of detention and deportation, as well as the deep-seated structural factors driving Ecuadorian migration to the United States. Then, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador with deportees and family members of detained migrants, the study seeks to understand ways in which these policies are embodied both within and outside U.S. borders. It is suggested that the detention and deportation system engenders chaos - or the appearance of chaos - in numerous spaces and for various groups of individuals. Three chaotic geographies of the system are explored in order to scrutinize the enactment of immigration policy: the operation of the system itself, detainees\u27 experiences, and reverberations of detention and deportation in Ecuador. Data show that inside U.S. borders, these enforcement policies interact recursively with processes of racialization and criminalization to generate insecurity for detained migrants and discipline employees to behave in particular ways. In addition, due to its inherent disorder and confusion, the detention and deportation system projects a cloak of impenetrability that hides the powerful actors behind its expansion, faults, and abuses. The dissertation then investigates how the chaos of detention and deportation extends transnationally to countries of migrant origin to produce insecurity precisely at the scale of the home for migrants\u27 families, communities, and for returned migrants. In Ecuador, detention and deportation increase economic and ontological insecurity for family members and returned migrants in ways that spread throughout communities. Moreover, data from Ecuador illustrate that policymakers\u27 objectives of deterrence do not play out as anticipated. In this project, the author joins critical scholars in calling for an expanded understanding of the concept of security, one which incorporates multiple scales and operates across political borders

Resolving the Influence of Forest-Canopy Structure on Snow Depth Distributions with Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Predicting changes in forested seasonal snowpacks under altered climate scenarios is one of the most pressing hydrologic challenges facing today’s society. Approximately 2 billion people worldwide, as well as numerous ecosystems and ecosystem services depend on water released from snowmelt. Airborne- and satellite-based remote sensing methods hold the potential to transform measurements of terrestrial water stores in snowpack, improve process representations of snowpack accumulation and ablation, and generate high quality predictions that inform potential strategies to better manage water resources. While the effects of forest on snowpack are well documented, many of the fine-scale processes influenced by the forest-canopy are not directly accounted for because most snow models don’t explicitly represent canopy structure and canopy heterogeneity. The goal of this project is improving snow remote-sensing methods in forested ecosystems using fine scale lidar measurements to identify capabilities and limitations of coarser scale remote sensing. We use terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data collected during NASA’s 2017 SnowEX campaign to resolve canopy and sub-canopy snow distributions at high resolution, and to understand the relationships between canopy and snow distributions across scales. Our sample scales range from individual trees to patches of trees across the Grand Mesa, Colorado, USA, NASA SnowEx site