Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire by Jeffrey S. Kahn (review)

Immigrant detention—a carceral regime based not on criminal punishment but on the enforcement of civil laws governing the movement of non-citizens—is a seemingly naturalized feature of the captivity landscape of the United States of America.¹ Yet as activists coalescing under the banner of #AbolishICE frequently point out, mass long-term immigrant detention is a relatively recent phenomenon. The most commonly understood turning point came in 1996 with a series of laws signed by President Bill Clinton. But any history of immigrant detention fixated on such legislative promulgations would miss a pivotal episode: the maritime interdiction of Haitian migrants from the 1980s onward, culminating in the creation of a detention camp at US Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (GTMO), Cuba, where War on Terror captives would be sent a decade later. By 1992, GTMO was the largest immigration detention facility operated by the US anywhere in the world: the number of Haitians held there or at sea was twice the total capacity of the domestic immigration prison system.

Jeffrey Kahn's Islands of Sovereignty tells the story of how this "pointillist maritime border" (253) unfolded between the US and Haiti—a border that is equally important to understanding contemporary regimes of carceral mobility as the better-known terrestrial frontier with Mexico. While all borders are "social constructs," a maritime one faces the additional challenge of lacking any fixed geospatial referent, a line imagined on a map. The border Kahn describes consists of ships and bases working to intercept, detain, and forcibly repatriate Haitian migrants before they can reach US soil where, presumably, they would have greater access to legal remedies. This regime depends on a bilateral agreement with Haiti, since ordinarily ships are thought of as miniature extensions of the sovereign territory of the states whose flags they fly and ordinarily cannot be boarded by foreign navies while on the high seas. With Haiti's "consent" as a sovereign state safely in hand, US immigration bureaucrats on the open seas exercising near-total power over migrants are the "islands of sovereignty" of the book's title. "Islands" also harkens to the Insular Cases, the influential set of US Supreme Court decisions that developed the legal framework for colonial rule over so-called "unincorporated territories" such as Puerto Rico and helped set the tone for regulating the exercise of jurisdiction outside US borders more generally.

Such notions of expansive authority—attempts to reconcile despotism with democracy—mobilize and rely upon a sense of the oceans as a zone external to ordinary legal order. They are also enabled by a universe of legal practices with their own materiality and rhythms requiring special attention. That attention has produced a compelling ethnography of liberal legal order that draws on Kahn's background in linguistic anthropology and his professional experiences as a litigator and judicial clerk.

Islands of Sovereignty is at its strongest in modelling a distinctive approach to legal anthropology attentive to questions of scale, space, and materiality in a way that is left out of prevailing approaches, which tend to focus on participant-observation of adjudication or perform close readings of legal texts in the spirit of ideology critique. In Chapter 2, Kahn traces the maritime border regime's emergence: not as a scheme imagined ex nihilo, but rather a state to a series of court orders in the 1970s blocking or delaying the deportation of Haitian migrants who had made landfall in the US. Here, Kahn brings to bear a nuanced theorization of jurisdiction as an instantiation of authority both linguistic and material, one that can be exercised differently over space, over types of legal questions, and over institutional bodies. This allows Kahn to make sense of protracted litigation as a complex field of struggle involving multiple actors, including: the bureaucracy, and specifically the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)²; different layers of the federal judiciary, frequently at odds with each other; and Haitian litigants themselves in their...