Discussions on U.S. border enforcement have traditionally focused on the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary, inadvertently obscuring U.S.-Caribbean relations and the concerning asylum and detention policies unfolding there. Boats, Borders, and Bases offers the missing, racialized histories of the U.S. detention system and its relationship to the interception and detention of Haitian and Cuban migrants. It argues that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations actually established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration and detention and border deterrent practices in the U.S. This book promises to make a significant contribution to a truer understanding of the history and geography of the U.S. detention system overall.

"Although this book makes a much-needed contribution to critical geography, migration, race, criminology, and legal scholarship, it also nicely complements recent work-like From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America, which seek to identify the rise of migrant detention throughout the US. This book takes that task one step further by theorizing spaces and processes of deterrence and detention beyond the interior of the US while making an even broader contribution to research on multijurisdictional patchworks." * International Criminal Justice Review *
"Long-neglected by scholars of mass incarceration and migration alike, the U.S. immigration detention system is attracting increasing concern and media attention in the Trump era. Much of this coverage, however, lacks historical context. A majority of scholarship on migrant detention focuses on the explosive growth of the system since 9/11 and on the US-Mexico border as a primary enforcement site. Boats, Borders, and Bases contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that fills gaps in these narratives by illuminating the deeper and less visible Cold War and Caribbean roots of the contemporary detention system." * Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books *
"A book with an urgent ethical and legal purpose." * Religious Studies Review *

Jenna M. Loyd is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Alison Mountz is Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University.