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.