Do mobile phone bans show that immigration detention is becoming more like prison?

ABSTRACT The mobile phone enables people to be heard through walls of confinement. During the suspension of visits to immigration detention in the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile phones were a lifeline to family and friends. There is also a long history of people using phones to document and communicate their experience in Australian-run detention to the world. The Australian government’s attempts to ban mobile phones in detention provide a lens, and in this paper, a case study, to explore whether immigration detention in Australia is becoming more like prison. I argue that while the official purpose for detention remains administrative not punitive, the proposed mobile phone bans reveal the changing function of detention in Australian border control. Mobile phone bans show how people in influential roles have reimagined the legal subject of detention from the ‘asylum seeker’ to the ‘migrant criminal’. Proposals to ban mobile phones also convey a transformation in how immigration detention is legally conceived – from a civil space under the supervision of police and the general criminal law to a more segregated space ruled from within. Drawing on scholarship on law, crimmigration, and carcerality, this paper traces how mobile phone bans came to be regarded as the natural next step in detention law-making.