The University of Arizona Press
Legal Care
Advocacy and Friction in Family Detention
Family detention garnered much public attention when it expanded dramatically in 2014 as significantly increased numbers of migrant groups began arriving and requesting asylum at the Mexico-U.S. border. During this period, the Obama administration designated three detention facilities, two in South Texas, to hold such families while they underwent part of the asylum legal process. One became the largest immigrant detention facility in the country.
In Legal Care anthropologist Erin Routon explores the operations of these facilities through the unique perspectives of volunteer legal advocates. Routon offers a compelling ethnographic account of the hidden labor and emotional resilience of those advocates. Through the lens of “legal care,” Routon reframes legal aid as a form of caregiving, revealing how these advocates resist the structural and legal violence of family detention while supporting asylum-seeking parents and children. Drawing on immersive fieldwork and firsthand narratives, the book exposes the human cost of administrative incarceration and the quiet power of care in spaces designed to exclude.
Timely, urgent, and deeply humane, this work speaks to scholars and practitioners across anthropology, law and society, migration studies, and carceral justice. Routon’s accessible and evocative writing invites readers to reconsider activism and advocacy, offering new language for understanding resistance and solidarity in the face of institutional violence. This book is essential reading for anyone committed to justice, care, and the future of immigration policy in the United States.
“Legal Care is an important contribution to the literature on immigration detention and immigration advocacy. Its strength lies in its analysis of the ‘legal care’ provided by advocates who work within the walls of detention facilities. By focusing on care, Routon does two important things. First, she provides a unique insight into the structural and legal violences faced every day by detained families. Second, she provides a useful analysis of the unique frictions and tensions experienced by those doing this work; in doing so, she offers new language that advocates can use in both their work in the system and in their self-care.”—Emily Ruehs-Navarro, co-editor of Kids in Cages: Surviving and Resisting Child Migrant Detention
“Routon’s Legal Care draws on engaged ethnographic research with immigration attorneys and legal service workers inside U.S. immigration detention facilities to vividly show how the immigration legal system enacts violence on migrant bodies, and how these legal workers’ advocacy itself becomes a form of care to sustain migrant survival within this system. The nuanced treatment of the embodied and temporal dimensions of this ‘legal care work’ help reveal not only the ways in which legal and social service workers are critical humanitarian actors in sites of migration violence, but also the limits of this form of care work at the edges of institutional, political, and legal violence targeting people on the move.”—Kristin E. Yarris, co-editor of Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities: Engaged Ethnography
