Investigating the Indefinite Detention of Mariel Refugees

5030 Brunson Drive,Coral Gables FL 33146

27 February, 2023

Description

Featuring Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley, Co-creators of “White Lies,” an NPR podcast Danny Rivero, Creator of “Detention by Design,” a WLRN podcast Brianna Nofil, College of William & Mary Mirta Ojito, author of Finding Mañana: a Memoir of a Cuban Exodus Moderated by Michael J. Bustamante and Antonio Mora, University of Miami For eleven days in August 1991, 119 Cuban refugees from the Mariel Boatlift incarcerated in Talladega, Alabama held federal prison officials hostage to protest their imminent deportation to Cuba. This incident followed even larger uprisings at prisons in Georgia and Louisiana in 1987 among Cubans who had been deemed “excludable” from the United States and indefinitely detained ever since. In Season 2 of the Pulitzer Prize-finalist NPR podcast “White Lies,” investigative journalists Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley work backwards from these crises to explore the unfolding of the Mariel Boatlift, Mariel migrants’ struggles to navigate the U.S. immigration and criminal justice systems, and the ways such challenges were deeply inflected by the politics of race. Join us for an interactive conversation with the creators of the show and invited experts about Mariel’s complex afterlives, comparative U.S. immigration policy then and now, and the power of the podcast form for investigative reporting. Sponsored by: WLRN & At the University of Miami: Cuban Heritage Collection Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban American Studies School of Communications Center for Global Black Studies Immigration Clinic at the School of Law