On 14 July 2017, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced that it would shorten the time period for holding eleven kinds of noncitizen detainee records and invited public comment on these changes. NARA stated that the decision to recategorize many of these records as “temporary” was because they held “little or no research value.” The files included records of abuse, assault, and deaths of people in immigration detention. Curious how NARA valued research, we designed a project asking what could be learned—about abuse in detention and NARA—from these documents. This article describes our methodological approach and our findings and discusses the implications of both for future research on immigration, government archiving practices, and accountability. We submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the eleven document types slated for earlier disposal and analyzed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s documentation of neglect and abuse in immigration detention. To do so, we traced the documents’ intertextuality, showing how each document relied on—and further produced—other documents. Challenging NARA’s calculative logics, we show that disposing of these documents would widen gaps, holes, and silences in an already partial, state-centric archive, limiting which future histories of U.S. immigration policies might be told.

2017 年 7 月 14 日，美国国家档案和记录管理局 (NARA) 宣布将缩短保存 11 种非公民被拘留记录的时间，并就这些变化征求公众意见。NARA 表示，将其中许多记录重新归类为“临时”的决定是因为它们“几乎没有研究价值或没有研究价值”。这些文件包括在移民拘留中被虐待、殴打和死亡的记录。好奇 NARA 如何重视研究，我们设计了一个项目，询问可以从这些文件中学到什么——关于拘留中的虐待和 NARA。本文描述了我们的方法论方法和我们的发现，并讨论了两者对未来移民研究、政府档案实践和问责制的影响。我们提交了信息自由法案对 11 种文件类型的要求，要求提前处置，并分析了移民和海关执法部门关于移民拘留中忽视和虐待的文件。为此，我们追踪了文档的互文性，展示了每个文档如何依赖并进一步生成其他文档。挑战 NARA 的计算逻辑，我们表明，处理这些文件将扩大本已部分的、以国家为中心的档案中的空白、漏洞和沉默，从而限制了美国移民政策的未来历史可能被告知。显示每个文档如何依赖并进一步生成其他文档。挑战 NARA 的计算逻辑，我们表明，处理这些文件将扩大本已部分的、以国家为中心的档案中的空白、漏洞和沉默，从而限制了美国移民政策的未来历史可能被告知。显示每个文档如何依赖并进一步生成其他文档。挑战 NARA 的计算逻辑，我们表明，处理这些文件将扩大本已部分的、以国家为中心的档案中的空白、漏洞和沉默，从而限制了美国移民政策的未来历史可能被告知。