Detention officials justify abuse as reimposing sovereignty over lawbreakers

Evidence

The combination of racial and physical abuse seemed incomprehensible to many detainees, as is much racial terror, but the detention sta√‘s rationale is clear: Detainees have violated some law and, by extension, U.S. sovereignty, which requires a disciplinary apparatus to reimpose that sovereignty through physical, verbal, and psychological abuse; immigrants who have overstayed their visas are violating territorial sovereignty, and those who commit criminal o√enses, even small ones, are violating social conventions of sovereignty that maintain the rule of law. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 816