Detained and Deported

Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire

By: Margaret Regan

Narrated by: Frankie Corzo

An intimate look at the people ensnared by the US detention and deportation system, the largest in the world

On a bright Phoenix morning, Elena Santiago opened her door to find her house surrounded by a platoon of federal immigration agents. Her children screamed as the officers handcuffed her and drove her away. Within hours, she was deported to the rough border town of Nogales, Sonora, with nothing but the clothes on her back. Her two-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, both American citizens, were taken by the state of Arizona and consigned to foster care. Their mother's only offense: living undocumented in the United States.

Immigrants like Elena, who've lived in the United States for years, are being detained and deported at unprecedented rates. Thousands languish in detention centers - often torn from their families - for months or even years. Deportees are returned to violent Central American nations or unceremoniously dropped off in dangerous Mexican border towns. Despite the dangers of the desert crossing, many immigrants will slip across the border again, stopping at nothing to get home to their children.

Drawing on years of reporting in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, journalist Margaret Regan tells their poignant stories. Inside the massive Eloy Detention Center, a for-profit private prison in Arizona, she meets detainee Yolanda Fontes, a mother separated from her three small children. In a Nogales soup kitchen, deportee Gustavo Sanchez, a young father who'd lived in Phoenix since the age of eight, agonizes about the risks of the journey back.

Regan demonstrates how increasingly draconian detention and deportation policies have broadened police powers, while enriching a private prison industry whose profits are derived from human suffering. She also documents the rise of resistance, profiling activists and young immigrant "Dreamers" who are fighting for the rights of the undocumented.

Compelling and heart-wrenching, Detained and Deported offers a rare glimpse into the lives of people ensnared in America's immigration dragnet.

©2015 Margaret Regan (P)2017 Beacon Press

Critic reviews

"Intimate and heartbreaking.... For those who have been searching for an authentic look at people caught between borders, this is it." ( Publishers Weekly)

"A timely look at the inhumane effects of immigration policies in the United States.... Regan's books bring into focus the fates of undocumented people fighting against the odds to make it into America and then, if they get here, struggling, and often failing, to build a life." ( Kirkus Reviews)

"Margaret Regan has done it again. With beautiful, absorbing prose, and meticulous research, she captures the intense and intimate stories of those detained, deported, and forcibly separated from their families by the most massive detention and deportation system we've ever had in the United States. A powerful and deeply moving book." (Todd Miller, author of Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security)

gr8 book

this book was very good from beginning to end. it was interesting and moving from start to finish. I recommend this book to anyone that is interested in immigration concerns.