Weaponized waiting: how an administrative burden harms families visiting loved ones in immigration detention

Abstract This paper introduces “weaponized waiting,” a newly-identified type of administrative burden inflicted upon families visiting loved ones in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with family members and three years of ethnographic fieldwork in three Southern California facilities, this study argues that waiting is deployed as a bureaucratic tool to harm families. The act of waiting, regulated by opaque rules—from protocols that organize transfers of detained people to dress codes that govern visitors’ apparel—emerges as a form of bureaucratic violence that is both punitive and disciplinary. The findings reveal that when visitation policies obligate relatives to wait for contact with each other, this amplifies damage to families already burdened by the threat of deportation. Further, waiting is weaponized at both macro and micro levels. At the macro level, facility policies signal hostility, while otherwise being unresponsive and unaccountable. At the micro level, waiting is extended at the discretion of individual bureaucrats whose choices frequently appear arbitrary in the eyes of visitors. Consequently, not only do visitors lose control over their time, the resulting separation from their detained loved ones produces feelings of powerlessness, anger, and despair.