Patricia Manning,
SIROW Social Services Coordinator and Advocate for the
Campaign for Women in Immigration Detention Facilities in Arizona
 for an interactive discussion.

Manning will lead an interactive discussion grounded in her experience working with women immigrant detainees in Eloy CCA, about who gets detained, why they have migrated from their home countries, what have been their experiences along the way and in detention, and what are the institutional hurdles they face to achieving safe,  just and dignified treatment throughout their months of detention. The discussion will be grounded in the following frame:
  
US immigration policy has been increasingly driven by political processes centered more on ideologically framed considerations of insecurity, exclusion, and the demand for “proving individual worth” than on the primacy of respect for human and civil rights, the presumption of innocence, acceptance of diversity, and the intrinsic worth of individuals. Hierarchies of value and strict regimens of control are inherent to immigration policy, and to a lesser extent and less obvious way, within immigration judicial proceedings. The militarized subcultures characterizing immigration enforcement agencies, the congressionally driven reliance on detention of (im)migrants exacerbated by certain Homeland Security directives, implementing agencies’ discretion, and various anti-immigrant state initiatives (e.g., AZ SB-1070), and the growth and influence of the private prison industry on policy-making in this area have all meant in practice that once apprehended, (im)migrants are treated indiscriminately as criminals.
 
Those prevailing norms and practices do not take into account the complex realities of migrants’ lives that led each individual or family to undertake the risks inherent in migrating. Nor do they respect individual and community vulnerabilities, traumas, or dislocations experienced by many migrants that either compelled their journeys or confronted them along the way. Once within the U.S., gender-norming in social roles and the assumptions embedded within the web of immigration-related institutions about the relative value of women immigrants of different classes and ethnicities, place women detainees and their families at particular risk for compounding psycho-social harms.

• Date:  Wed,
  April 4th, 2012

• Time: 12pm – 2pm
  

• Location:  Gender and Women's Studies Building
  Conference Room 100
  925 N. Tyndall Ave  
  Click for Map
   
  Parking: street metered parking in front of the GWS building and along 1st and 2nd Streets. Parking in the Main Gate garage which is directly behind the GWS building. Enter the garage on 2nd Street between Euclid and Tyndall Aves)
   
  For more information, contact SBS-GWS@email.arizona.edu
  or call 520-621-7338
   

The lecture is free and open to everyone.
Feel free to bring your lunch.
Refreshments provided.