Agustin Guerrero SURF SMART
Challenging Immigrant Detention: Race, Class, and Collective Action
The United States has increasingly relied on human confinement and incarceration to manage immigration, despite a large body of evidence showing that it inflicts a wide degree of violence and harms upon our noncitizen community members and their families. How can we challenge this inhumane system? This summer, my mentor and I will try to answer this question. With a focus on the American electorate as a key mechanism for policy change, we will examine the social forces driving mass detention and explore actionable, evidence-based solutions intended to mitigate harm. Community-based case management alternatives offer a realistic pathway that may reshape the current system characterized by ineffective notions of punishment and deterrence that produce a profound human cost. The main study utilizes a nationwide survey experiment that examines whether race-class fusion communication strategies can spur collective action among the electorate in pursuit of an immigration system that preserves liberty, dignity, and the value of familial bonds for all immigrants.
Message To Sponsor
I want to thank the donor for your support in making this research opportunity possible. This project is motivated by a sense of urgency for finding alternatives to the increasingly dire situation that immigrants confront when they enter the United States. It is in the publics interest to produce this kind of research, and thanks to your support we are able to carry out this task. Additionally, thanks to your material support I am able to participate in this research program and sustain my living expenses.