Chaotic Economies of Confinement: Profit, Dependency, and Extraction in U.S. Immigration Detention

Nancy Hiemstra

Stony Brook University

Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies

Drawing on two decades of research, this presentation examines how the U.S. detention system operates through—and benefits from—chaos, producing disordered geographies that obscure responsibility and extend confinement. It shows how this manufactured disorder enables and conceals the system's core profit-making logics, where expansion is driven less by policy effectiveness than by opportunities for revenue generation. Companies providing food, medical care, commissary goods, and oversight mechanisms generate income through confinement, creating webs of economic dependency that blur public and private boundaries. The presentation also considers how recent shifts in immigration enforcement are fueling explosive growth in immigrant confinement and concludes by outlining strategies to cut through the chaos and disrupt the financial logics sustaining detention's expansion across the United States