The latest assault on immigrants and non-citizens will destroy many lives before it is finished. But these attacks will be defeated for precisely the same reason that they are now energized: America has evolved. Join us for a lecture and conversation with Mark Dow, author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons.

Dow’s awareness of immigrant detention began in 1990 when he started teaching English at Miami's Krome Detention Center and, soon after, went to work for the Haitian Refugee Center. Over the next decade he visited jails and detention centers around the country and interviewed detainees, immigration officers, and prison wardens. This was long before the media began reporting regularly on immigrant detention and mass deportation.

In this talk, Dow will reflect on the most significant surprises he encountered in writing American Gulag: that the system was even more brutal than many on the outside imagined; and that correctional officers were often the harshest critics of that system. He will also discuss the accidents that led to writing the book in the first place, as well as some of the mistakes made along the way -- and the tensions we face today between optimism and realism.