Fantagraphics has announced that it will be publishing R. E. Burke‘s graphic memoir Visiting America: 19 Days In An I.C.E. Facility. It’ll arrive in stores in May 2027.
While on vacation in the Pacific Northwest, 28-year-old British cartoonist R. E. Burke was shackled and detained in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) facility for 19 days. As her family mounted a campaign to free her, R.E. Burke documented the lives of the ordinary, innocent women she found herself incarcerated with and their attempts to survive the immoral violation of their legal and human rights.
In this work of graphic memoir and journalism, Burke tells the story of how, in February 2025, as she was attempting to cross the border into Canada from Washington State, an innocent technicality led to hours of terrifying interrogation and unjust detainment in an I.C.E. facility (run by the for-profit GEO corporation) for 19 days.
In vivid color and startling detail, Visiting America immerses readers in her experiences: her fear, despair, disorientation, and her fellow detainees’ attempt to help her acclimate. Burke documents in comics form, the difficulty of navigating a haphazard, callous bureaucracy, rife with misinformation, stonewalling, and threats. As her mental and physical conditions worsen, despite the best efforts of the women to take care of each other, a campaign to free her mounted by friends and family garners international support.
Visiting America is not only her own story, but the stories of the strength, spirit, and humor of the other women — mothers, daughters, workers, innocent people fleeing war, genocide, and abuse — whose situations are even more precarious and desperate. They are trapped in a cruel, horrifying, and rapidly worsening system with no place safe to return to. Burke’s memoir includes an epilogue with updates about some of the women she was detained with.
Visiting America is potent evidence for the graphic memoir’s power to share our most vulnerable stories. Burke’s pages demand the reader’s attention, and her story demands a nation to take action.
