Scapegoating the Vulnerable: The Indefinite Detention of Immigrants in America's War on Terror.

Since September 2001, the Bush administration has developed a series of mechanisms, by-passing due process protections, to indefinitely detain Middle Eastern men on a civil immigration pretext. This paper will argue that the nation's immigration laws have been misappropriated to craft a system of preventive detention giving rise to imprisonment without charge for weeks and months, denial of access to lawyers or family visitation, interrogations and threats during the period of detention, physical and psychological abuse and ultimately deportations without a fair initial hearing or the exhaustion of available appellate recourse. This new system of civil detention is specifically designed to weaken constitutional due process protections. U.S. officials may have borrowed a page from illiberal regimes that are "war on terror" allies in developing their administrative detention strategies, a contention that this paper will also consider. Civil detention has also been correlated to the practice of "renditions," whereby individuals detained in the U.S. are deported to countries more willing to engage in traditional torture practices in continued interrogation post-deportation. The combination of detention practices within the U.S. and the "rendition" of detainees to countries known to engage in torture, makes explicit the link, under the Bush administration, between the violations of procedural rights in the U.S. and the violations of the laws of war outside of the U.S. This paper will contribute to an understanding of how the war on immigrants -- and attendant domestic detention practices -- is an integral part of America's war on terror strategy. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]