Marlene Nava Ramos is a doctoral student in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center where she studies the political economy of immigration detention infrastructure  under the advisement of Dr. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. Her dissertation explores the infrastructural expansion of immigration prisons/ jails in the states of Florida, New Jersey, and Texas since the 1980s as part of the country's uneven prison build-up. Marlene is an alumna of Columbia University and Cornell University and teaches in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geospatial Sciences at Lehman College in the Bronx.