Nursing inquiry
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This paper opens with first-hand accounts of critical care medical interventions in which detainees, in the custody of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are brought to the emergency department for treatment. ⋯ It offers an analysis of the display of sovereign and biopolitical power over the lives (and deaths) of detainees (Foucault), as well as the ways these individuals are reduced to "bare life" under the political pretext of an emergency or "state of exception" (Agamben). Our purpose here is both theoretical and practical: to better understand the often hidden agency or impersonal "will" exercised by the immigrant detention system, but also to equip clinicians in these and cognate facilities (e.g., prisons) with the critical tools by which they might better navigate incommensurable paradigms (i.e., care vs. custody) in order to deliver the best care while upholding their ethical duties as a care provider. This is all the more pressing because hospitals are not sanctuaries and given the incursion of federal law enforcement agents, nurses may find themselves conscripted as de facto agents of the state.