Book Review: Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theatres of Immigration Law

Guest post by David Suber. David is a PhD student conducting research on people smuggling, corruption and border policing at the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, UCL. He is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist and documentarist, and co-director of the journalist collective Brush&Bow C.I.C. @davidlsuber 

Review of Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theatres of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda (Duke University Press, 2023) 

The book Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theatres of Immigration Law is one that should make its way on the shelves of those studying or practicing immigration law and migrant criminalisation. Framing US immigration law within a colonial legacy of systematic exploitation and race discrimination, Michelle Casteñeda’s work bares witnesses to the systematic and routinized performance of migrant criminalization inside deportation rooms, family detention sites, and asylum hearings.  

Casteñeda unpicks the absurdity of carceral spaces, designed as paradoxical and delirious locations both showing and, at the same time, hiding what happens in them. Hidden rooms are where immigration law is practiced, the absurdity lying in the fact these are spaces where people are supposed to seek protection (through asylum and recognition) whilst facing the risk of apprehension and expulsion (elimination).  

The novelty of the book lies in the use of a performance studies perspective to show the mise-en-scène of courtrooms as theatrical microcosms. In witnessing and recreating these spaces in writing, Casteñeda critically comments on the scenographic set up of these rooms. According to the author, the absurdity of scenographic and choreographic gestures and spaces are conceived as a technique of performative power. She enquires about the lighting, gestures, framing, and language within such choreographed settings, explaining the theatres of ritualistic and depersonalized violence of exploitable and deportable non-citizens. Legal immigration systems, she argues, are more interested in showcasing their own authority and impunity than persuading anyone about their legitimacy. 

In analysing the choreographic and theatrical dimensions of a removal room on the 9th floor of ICE offices in New York, a detention centre courtroom in Texas, and an asylum office in the Northeast, Casteñeda lays bare the contradiction and crisis of meaning within immigration law. Pushing for more asylum rights and the recognition of ‘good’ migrants comes hand in hand with the enhanced criminalisation of ‘bad’ migrants, hence criminalising the overwhelming majority of people whose reasons to move, be these poverty, generalised conflict, climate change, illness, love or hope, are not recognised as legitimate by the restricted definition of asylum.  

The book (around 150 pages) is made up of three chapters, each referring to a specific room. Casteñeda grounds her ethnographic work on witnessing the inside and outside of these rooms, spaces inaccessible or unknown to the public, but where a spectacle is constantly re-enacted to the people facing incarceration their lawyers and accompaniers.  

The book reads well, moving from room to room by integrating ethnographic accounts and witnessed scenes, with analysis of space and interactions between migrants, accompaniers, and asylum officers. It makes an interesting read for anyone in humanitarian migrant-support movements or engaging with the immigration system and asking how to frame their engagement in ways that can critically move beyond reaffirming or unwittingly repairing broken detention systems: “How to envision a different system when the current one seems to always contain its own remedy?” (pp. 98). The author has no easy answers to this, but provides original and creative arguments pointing to transformative scenarios. 

In the tradition of “writing as performance,” the book not only analyses the scenography of these rooms but also offers a rehearsal space in which to imagine alternatives to criminalisation. Disappearing Rooms provides the tools to see, listen, and imagine what happens inside immigration courtrooms so as to change the habitual ways of perceiving immigration law, sustaining the possibility for a decolonial and abolitionist perspective inherent to (im)migrants’ freedom of movement. The outspoken aim of the book is to bridge the distance between the invisibility of these rooms and the hypervisibility of migration in everyday news and public debate, challenging fixed roles and images of migration that seem somewhat inevitable or impossible to change.  

“Some people are watching and others are being watched. Some people are affected by these systems and others are assumed to be unaffected. Some people are inside and others are outside. All these assumptions contribute to the sense that we are trapped in a fixed social order. In contrast, the purpose of scenographic experimentation (…) is to unbuild this.” (p.14) 

Ultimately, Disappearing Rooms is a work that transcends disciplinary boundaries, analysing individual scenes that Castañeda witnessed as an interpreter, advocate, and courtroom accompanier. It features a collaboration with journalist and artist Molly Crabapple, whose illustrations are not forensic reconstructions of these hidden rooms, but rather an outspoken attempt to represent details of the events taking place within them. This is again part of the performance perspective adopted by Casteñeda: the images and the words of the book attempt to distil what really happens in these hidden rooms. If witnessed and spoken about, what happened in these rooms doesn’t go unnoticed. It remains alive in the present and available for experimentation and change.