Extractive Authoritarianism: Medical Apartheid in U.S. Immigration Detention

This article examines U.S. immigration detention as a revenue-generating legal system that profits from prolonged confinement and bodily deterioration. The second Trump administration has systematized this violence through unprecedented expansion, dismantling of oversight, and concentration of executive authority. Drawing on government policy, administrative datasets, facility records, and case documentation, the analysis demonstrates how detention institutionalizes medical neglect, retaliation, solitary confinement, reproductive coercion, language exclusion, deathbed releases, and jurisdictional manipulation as routine administrative practice. Bilateral transfer agreements extend this system extraterritorially, outsourcing custody to sites of documented torture where U.S. officials create conditions meeting the legal definition of enforced disappearance. The article theorizes this configuration as extractive authoritarianism, a mode of governance where legal formalism enables capital accumulation through the exploitation of civil vulnerability. This framework advances critical socio-legal scholarship by demonstrating how procedural compliance produces structural violence within formally lawful systems. It reveals the persistence of detention’s harms across cycles of reform and establishes the necessity of abolitionist responses.