Documenting Detention: The Politics of Archiving Immigration Enforcement Records in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

On 14 July 2017, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced that it would shorten time period for holding eleven kinds of noncitizen detainee records invited public comment on these changes. NARA stated decision to recategorize many as “temporary” was because they held “little or no research value.” The files included abuse, assault, deaths people in immigration detention. Curious how valued research, we designed a project asking what could be learned—about abuse detention NARA—from documents. This article describes our methodological approach findings discusses implications both future immigration, government archiving practices, accountability. We submitted Freedom Information Act requests document types slated earlier disposal analyzed Immigration Customs Enforcement’s documentation neglect To do so, traced documents’ intertextuality, showing each relied on—and further produced—other Challenging NARA’s calculative logics, show disposing documents widen gaps, holes, silences an already partial, state-centric archive, limiting which histories policies might told.