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- [00:01]
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- [01:21]
History Extra Host
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. By the middle of December 2025, more than 68,400 people were being held in immigration detention in the United States, according to figures published by U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This is a detention system that relies on the use of many local jails, and today's guest, Brianna Nothal, has written a book showing that this is nothing new. The federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years. In this episode, she speaks to Eleanor Evans about the historical pressures and factors that have shaped the world's largest system of migrant incarceration, and explores how it remains a defining and deeply contested feature of American immigration policy today.
- [02:08]
Eleanor Evans
We are here today to talk about the long history of this type of detention and the people that it's affected through the last century or so. Could you introduce our listeners to the scope of your new book?
- [02:19]
Brianna Knofel
Yes. My book is called the Migrants An American History of Mass Incarceration, and it looks at the very deep roots of migrant detention in the United States. Even though migrant detention is at an absolutely sort of unprecedented scale today, the US has been using incarceration as a tool of border control and a tool to facilitate deportations for basically as long as the US has had restrictive immigration law. So my book begins in the 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion act, which is the US's first law that really significantly restricts who can immigrate to the United States. So it bans all Chinese laborers, basically wholesale. And it raises this question that the US Is very much continuing to wrestle with today, which is, you know, if Congress can pass these expansive, many of us would say draconian immigration laws. But there's really big logistical questions about what it looks like to actually enforce that. Right. Like what does it actually mean on the ground to try to bar tens of thousands of people from admission or try to try to remove tens of thousands of people who are already here. So my book looks at sort of how detention has been part of that story, how citizens, non citizens, policymakers, have wrestled with this really unsettling idea of administrative incarceration, of detaining people whose primary offense is that they have crossed a border, and how this system just explodes and expands over about 100 years.
- [03:55]
Eleanor Evans
So just to fully qualify this difference for any listeners who aren't as familiar with the history of detention and incarceration in the U.S. i wonder if you can draw any lines for us on the difference between federal facilities and local jails and things that are important for our listeners to understand as we get into this history.
- [04:14]
Brianna Knofel
Yes. So the system of detention in the United States is, by design, extraordinarily hard to wrap your head around. It is a patchwork system of tons of different facilities, each of which have sort of their own particular challenges. So broadly, the two categories of government run facilities is that we have federally run detention centers, which typically exclusively hold immigrant detainees, and they're overseen by the immigration service. But the US Also relies on hundreds of county jails, and county jails in the United States are, they're sort of a catch all element of our, of our criminal justice system. So if you are apprehended, you are probably going to be detained in a jail. So it holds pretrial folks. So folks who have not been convicted of a crime yet. It also holds folks who have been convicted but have relatively short sentences. So typically misdemeanors with sentences of less than a year. If you are convicted of a crime with a longer sentence, then you will typically be at a state or federal prison. So the US does not usually hold migrants for detention in prisons, but it does hold them in local jails. And part of the logic there, I think, I think part of what empowers this is that jails already hold tons of people who haven't been on trial, which is troubling in itself. Right. So I think in some ways holding migrants who have also not been on trial can, like, seem less sort of troubling in that space. But jails are also really interesting because they're run by local sheriffs in the United States. So they really reflect local character, local priorities, local politics, and basically, almost every county has a local jail. The one other thing maybe I'll note here is that your listeners may have heard a major player today in the US Immigration detention system, as well as in the British detention system, is private prison companies. So the vast majority of people who are detained today are going to be held in facilities that are run by private prisons. And this can sort of traverse both of those categories. So some of these are just freestanding private prisons, but also private prison companies in the United States now also operate some local jails, and they operate some of these federal immigration detention centers as well.
- [06:36]
Eleanor Evans
Okay, well, that's really useful context to have as we move forward. Thank you so much for distilling that, and I hope our listeners can hold that a bit in their heads as we move forward with the conversation. I want to go back to where you start, because my limited knowledge of sort of this era of migration, especially with the Chinese people you're talking about, was thinking predominantly west coast and angel island, the area in San Francisco. But you start in perhaps maybe in more unexpected places. I wonder if you can take us into what was happening in upstate New York and East coast at this time.
- [07:10]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah. So when we talk about the history of Chinese exclusion in the United States, historians really have told it mostly as a West coast story, and that's for good reason. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants are going to settle on the West Coast. The largest communities are on the west coast coast, particularly places like San Francisco, but also Oregon and Washington State. And so that is, you know, they're going to be involved in mining, but also building transcontinental railroads in the United States. However, as exclusion law sort of enters into the picture, what's going to happen is that migrants who want to immigrate to the United States are going to be looking for new routes. They are going to be wary of just showing up at the port at San Francisco because they know, Right. That there is this sort of fledgling immigration bureaucracy that is policing these ports in new ways. So migrants are going to do what migrants have done, you know, pretty much forever, which is they are going to look for another option. And so one of the options that becomes very popular right at the turn of the 20th century is that Chinese migrants are going to start entering through Canada. Canada doesn't have as restrictive of submigration laws against Chinese migration as the United States does. So it's much easier to get into Canada. And then the idea is that you cross the border on into the United States and you claim to be a U.S. citizen. So that is sort of the core of what most of these folks are going to do at this point. The US has very little in the way of tools to disprove people's claims of citizenship. So for many Chinese migrants, this is going to actually be a pretty effective way to make a sort of legal case that you are able to stay in the United States. One of the challenges this raises for the Immigration Service is that it's at this point, a really small agency. This is kind of the first major task it has been given. It is nothing like ICE today, right? Which is the US's sort of largest law enforcement body. It's really like a couple dozen people who are tasked with, like, a pretty impossible mandate. When you think about sort of how long the U.S. canadian border is, all of the sort of possibilities for someone to cross that, it's enormous. So one of the routes that becomes really significant takes Chinese migrants from the west coast of Canada to Montreal and then into northern New York. And one of the things that, when I was researching this sort of route, I was really fascinated to find was that the Immigration Service has a real conundrum here, because in San Francisco, they have detention space sort of at the port where they can hold people. In New York, they have Ellis island, very famous sort of site of entry, but also detention. But when they're apprehending people in these rural communities, they have nowhere to put them. They imagine that detention is a necessity, necessary part of this process. But there is no place to put these people. So what they start to do is they start to basically call up the local sheriffs in these rural communities and they say, listen, you've got a jail, it's probably got some space. The federal government will pay you a nightly rate for each one of these Chinese migrants that you detain in your local jail. And so for many of these sheriffs, this was an incredible deal. These were not communities that had a lot of opportunity to get federal resources. And so many of these sheriffs say, yeah, absolutely right. Send as many Chinese migrants as you can find. We'd love to put them in these jails. And it leads to all sorts of. I think just. It's horrific in terms of the conditions, but it also like, raises this really important sort of political economy story where many of these communities are going to see migrants as a commodity, as a sort of way to bring federal money into the communities. And so it's going to sort of set in motion a pattern that is going to persist, persist over the decades to come, which is that communities are going to build bigger jails. They are going to fuel carceral expansion for many reasons. But one of the reasons is because there's money to be made by getting these contracts with the immigration service to cooperate in detention and deportation work.
- [11:10]
Eleanor Evans
So it's a lucrative opportunity for some. And I'd like to go into some of the conditions that you mentioned in just a second, But I think a really interesting point that struck me is that it's not just the sheriffs and the staff at these jails or at these facilities. It also affects the community who benefit from watching out for certain groups of migrants and things on. I wonder if you could go into that a little.
- [11:32]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's always a question for the immigration Service how localities can be helpful to them. And it's a really tense thing because at least in theory, immigration law in the United States is completely federalized by the end of the 19th century. So that means that it's exclusively a federal prerogative. In theory, local law enforcement cannot pick people up for immigration offenses. Only immigration agents can do this. But what this sort of very small agency is going to realize is that they do not have the resources to do what Congress is asking them to do. And so they're very interested in how they can leverage local law enforcement, but also local vigilantism to sort of help them do the work of surveilling and policing the borders. But I think there's also a flip side to this. One of the things that is really striking to me in reading about these really early cases of detention is that for as long as this practice has existed, people have been uncomfortable with it. Like these, you know, just sort of, these are mostly like dairy farming communities along the border. These are not people who I think, ever imagine themselves sort of being at the crux of an immigration controversy. But in the local papers, right, these people are raising questions about, you know, is this ethical? Is this Christian? Many people will say people are going to hear, particularly as sort of the stories about the conditions and the suffering in these sites come out, people are going to say, like, is this how our community should be making money? Right. Can we justify this? Can we sort of justify commoditizing human suffering? And it's often really patronizing, and it's often not like progressive, necessarily. But there is this sort of foundational discomfort, comfort about what it means to incarcerate people with so. So little due process.
- [13:25]
Eleanor Evans
Yes. Just an insight into the sort of tension there that's really beginning to manifest virtually as soon as this process begins. I wonder if we can turn towards some of the experiences of the Chinese migrants that you have looked at, because their experiences do come through very strongly in the book. If you've crossed the border from Canada, you've been detained, you've been spotted, you've been detained. What sort of conditions await you in the early 20th century? And how does this evolve?
- [13:51]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah, so the conditions vary jail by jail, but they are sort of uniformly terrible. Most of these small town jails. And again, many of this is a common model, like ICE continues to rely very, very heavily on rural jails for detention. Many of them are quite small. Like a sort of quirk of jails, right, Is that they are very. It's sort of hard to make any generalizations about jails in the United States. There are urban jails that hold 5,000 people. There are jails and communities that are basically like a barn with some bars on the window. So it is. It is a sort of term that encompasses a really wide variety of spaces. But at the early 20th century, most of these jails were really like quite basic, I would say. And they were typically designed to hold about 12 people. So most of. Or many of my early sources for this project are there's like a prison commission that does these annual write ups of jails. And they're completely stunned. They're based in New York City, right. They don't really know what they're gonna find in these upstate New York jails. And they're absolutely stunned when they show up and they find that there are like a hundred Chinese migrants. Sometimes they'll say in like a jail that is built to hold 12 people. And so the conditions are awful, right? They sort of describe people being like warehoused, like basically stuck in closets, like places that were never mean to hold this many people. And one of the big sort of things is just disease. Like there's, you know, high times for. For epidemic illness. And as we learned during COVID right, like any sort of institutional environment, like this is going to be just. Just a hotbed for. For infection. So the, the conditions are really horrible. But I think one of the things that's important is that, you know, while the migrants are here, right, they are seeing this as sort of a step in the process to. While they're in these jails, they are filing habeas corpus claims, they are making these claims of American citizenship, almost none of which were true. But at least for this brief moment, the courts are going to defer to them really heavily. So most of these people are going to be in detention about five or six months in northern New York, which is also just really, really long. The average detention at San Francisco is thought to be a few weeks, which is long. And it's itself, but, you know, a totally different scale. But most of them are attempting to sort of get out. They are seeing this as a sort of middle ground for which they will sort of suffer, they will get through it, and then they will sort of be free to enter the United States even with this law in place. And I think that's important too, because so much of how communities talk about the Chinese migrants, and particularly how sheriffs talk about it, is they. They really speak of these migrants in, like, deeply racialized ways. Like, they say they're so obedient, they're so docile, they don't create any problems. They love to claim that, like, actually being detained in the United States is better than people's lives abroad. People's lives are so bleak in these other places. And it's just like. It's so obviously, like absurd, but it also is completely kind of erasing the way that these people very much are resisting detention. They're not necessarily staging uprisings or resisting in a way that might be hyper visible or legible to the immigration officials, but they are using the courts and they're using the courts really, really effectively.
- [17:20]
Eleanor Evans
I think they're a course what's available to them. I think that's a really interesting point because they're not arrested of a crime at this point. Are they like you say, they've been detained because they've crossed a border and they don't have a place to go yet, but they haven't at this point committed any crime.
- [17:38]
Brianna Knofel
Yes. So at this point, border crossing, legal entry, these are not yet criminal charges. These will become criminal charges in the United States in 1929. So we're still quite a few years off immigration detention, and still today is a purely administrative process. That's kind of the most important thing to know about it. Chinese migrants in the, in the late 19th century bring the practice of detention all the way to the Supreme Court court to basically challenge, Right. Whether you can deny someone their freedom while they are in deportation proceedings. And what the courts end up saying is they say this really a foundational precedent for U.S. immigration law, which is that they say that deportation is not a punishment for a crime. And it's the kind of thing I always tell my students. That kind of sounds good at first glance. Maybe it sounds non punitive, but what it means in practice is that deportation is basically completely untethered from most of the due process norms we associate with criminal proceedings in the US So that means that people in deportation proceedings do not have the right to an attorney, they do not have the right to a trial by jury. They do not necessarily get to see a judge. Right. They often see an immigration judge who's a bureaucrat. However, that is also something that sort of evolves over the 20th century. So at the time most of these Chinese migrants are entering the sort of loophole is that if you say you're a citizen, you have rights that a person who isn't claiming citizenship doesn't get. So one of those rights is that you can see a judge, you can bring your case in front of sort of the most traditional legal structure. And at least for these early years of the 20th century, the judges are really, you know, and most of these judges are like, deeply, have deeply racist views towards Chinese migrants. They are not sort of like allies in any way of Chinese migrants, but they're really uncomfortable with the precedent it sets that any citizen could be detained like this with no due process. So most of these habeas corpus claims, which are basically claims brought to the court saying you're being illegally held, the courts are going to very, very heavily side with the migrants themselves. And we see this on the west coast as well. And it's, the immigration service is so deeply freaked out by this. They keep saying, right, the courts are undercutting the work we're doing. Like all of our good work is being completely neutralized by the courts, which keep siding with the migrants themselves. So one of the immigration services priorities in these years is to get immigration further and further from the courts. They say, like if migrants are able to access the courts more easily, we are going to be held to higher due process standards and that is going to hinder our ability to, to deport as efficiently as possible. Basically what the immigration service does is that they bring a test case to court, basically saying that these are administrative decisions, these decisions of admission, even if someone claims to be a citizen, if they don't have a serious, what they consider to be a particularly legitimate evidence of that citizenship, that these should all be purely administrative decisions that are made by bureaucrats, not by judges. And the courts sort of gradually gradually cede their own legal authority to these bureaucrats. So it's really just kind of a brief moment where this habeas plan works. I would say there's like 5ish years where it's a really, really effective path. But yet again, right, migrants are going to have to pivot once the courts basically wash their hands of these cases. Once these become purely bureaucratic rather than legal decisions, they're going to have to come up with with new plans. So it's like, I think northern New York is such a fascinating moment because it sort of, it shows you how a detention economy can flourish, but it can sort of just as quickly disappear within a few years, right? These jails are holding zero Chinese migrants. Chinese migrants have totally pivoted their routes. They're now entering through Mexico for a variety of reasons. They're not making citizenship claims. They're trying different things. So you really see sort of the fluidity and the flexibility with which sort of people are responding to changes in law.
- [21:53]
History Extra Host
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- [23:05]
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- [23:35]
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- [24:37]
Eleanor Evans
Before we go any further, I just want to pause on the moment you just mentioned, the moment of a passing of a law which makes unlawful entry into the US a misdemeanor. That's punishable. What are the driving forces behind this?
- [24:50]
Brianna Knofel
This happens in 1929. It is a reaction largely to the US quota laws, which are passed a few years prior, which capped migration from Europe. But when the quota laws are being debated, it's an open question whether the US Is going to put a limit on migration from Mexico or not. And it's contentious. Some people want it. There's very emerging race science ideas that that suggests that Mexicans are sort of, you know, this deeply, culturally distinct, like, criminally prone group. So certainly there's kind of that camp of congresspeople, but there's also congresspeople from the southwest who say our local economy is completely dependent on these migrant workers. You are going to cripple agriculture in the United States if you cap the migration from Mexico. So ultimately, Mexico is not given a quota. The Western hemisphere is not touched in the quota law. So this law passes a few years. The law that turns illegal entry into a misdemeanor is passed a few years later. And it is sort of seen as the concession to the people who wanted the Mexican quota but didn't get it. So these sort of immigration hardliners. And so it's something historians have kind of debated the significance of, because on the one hand, historians have really emphasized that a very small fraction of people who entered illegally are charged with this. Like, you know, just 0.001%, probably of people who illegally enter. And these are hard numbers to get, but we just know the prosecutions seem like really low. But on the other hand, I think that there's evidence that this actually really does make a difference. One of the things that local jailers will report as sort of strange is that they say, well, now we really see the sort of tension between the criminal and administrative side of things. So they say, we're detaining Mexicans in our jails, and some for purely administrative reasons, like en route to deportation. But some of them we are now holding on criminal charges, but then once those criminal charges are done, we're detaining them for administrative reasons. So it kind of shows how people can move fluidly through these categories of sort of, you know, these legal categories. But at the end of the day, they're all still in this same jail. So for all of the sort of, you know, talk that this is a fundamentally different system, that it isn't criminal, like. Like if you are in the exact same jail, regardless how material is it, whether it is a criminal or administrative charge. But I think it is a really important precedent also in that it does criminalize border crossing for the first time. And it certainly gives ammunition to people who both, I think, rhetorically want to claim that all of these people are criminals, but also that want to process, prosecute.
- [27:38]
Eleanor Evans
And in that sense, do you mean the sort of optics of the groups who are being imprisoned and the way in which they are then perceived by society having been detained and imprisoned?
- [27:48]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think that the sort of criminalization of migrants is not only done through law, but it is also done through, you know, if you lock people up, it sort of normalizes the idea that they've done something to deserve being locked up. I think these images matter enormously.
- [28:05]
Eleanor Evans
You write that one consistency through all detainee stories was the agonizing uncertainty that detention wrought. And I just wonder if you can take us through a little bit of the evolution of this pattern for migrants entering the US through the period that you're talking about?
- [28:23]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a real consistency and, you know, a real challenge of this project is that we don't have, particularly for this earlier period, it's a really literally limited number of preserved writings of Migrants from detention. I mean, it's, it's exceptionally thin. And this is the challenge of doing histories of deportation in general, right? Which is that we're often using U.S. state records. And when people are deported, they disappear from the US State records. There is very ephemeral presences in, in the archive. And then when they're, when they're gone, like the U.S. the U.S. is done with them. We often have no sense of sort of what happens. But I think that from what we do have, and that comes in the form of letters written to the immigration service. It comes in the form of when people do get attorneys, attorneys sometimes retain records. It comes in the form of local newspaper reporting. So much of this project relied on just journalists in really small towns who asked questions about what was happening at their local jail. The one thing that I think really comes through is middle ground, right? It's sort of, this incredibly detention is sort of, it's liminal. You're between here and there and you do not know the fate of this case. And you also have like almost no sense of how long this is going to take. And I think that is particularly true in these rural jails. Most people's stories about being detained at a place like New York City or San Francisco is that sort of, the immigration service is very present there. That's their hub, right? But if you were detained, you know, in the middle of Ohio, you're the one immigrant who's detained at this rural county jail. The immigration service border control is a really distant presence. You are sort of mostly at the mercy of these local officials. You're mostly at the mercy of a sheriff who might see a pretty strong financial interest in keeping you there as long as possible, right. Who perhaps has no incentive to see you deported if he can kind of continue to monetize this. So there's so much uncertainty when people are in this space. And I think that like, it is something you can see like that is sort of uniquely agonizing that there is no sort of set. You know, just like, oh, we're going to go to trial on this date, we're going to sort of like have these steps. It's an incredibly unclear system. It's also a system that relies on the cooperation of other countries. I think that's something that can be kind of overlooked in thinking about deportation is that it's a two way street. It requires another country to take people back. So this becomes a really big deal for the US during wartime when all of a sudden borders are shifting. After World War I, and the US wants to deport people to nations that no longer acknowledge that passport or that no longer acknowledge that person as a citizen at all. So it's a huge amount of work to deport someone. And I think that is particularly true in the early 20th century. Right. Where the US is often having to wait for correspondences to travel across oceans in order to facilitate deportation. So when we look at the actual numbers of people the US Is deporting in these years, it can look really low. But that is because it is so resource intensive. And for the people who the US Is pursuing deportation cases against, it is a really just. It's a long, excruciating, tremendously unclear process.
- [31:43]
Eleanor Evans
So what's clear is that the logistics throughout this history are manifest and the uncertainty is acute, certainly for those who are living through that for a potentially long periods of time. A final point before we move on to another turning point in wartime is the idea that the moral compunction to worry about this as a, you know, a Christian duty or whatever should we be doing this perhaps intensifies when you're looking at other groups of migrants, women and children, for example, who will be coming from different parts of the world.
- [32:11]
Brianna Knofel
Absolutely. Another thing that I think is really evident in looking at the sort of long arc of detention is that the moral crises tend to reach their fever pitch. The sort of concern about detention, it always depends really heavily on who is being detained and sort of how innocent or not innocent they are imagined as being. So we see this really keenly in the decades that follow the Chinese Exclusion act. In the 10s and 20s, the US is going to start passing its first sort of massive restrictions on immigration from Europe. It's called the quota laws. It sets a certain cap for each European country, and it really heavily favors Western European countries, sort of of to the detriment of everybody else. One thing that I think is fascinating is that many European immigrants are now going to look to these same routes of migration through northern New York that Chinese migrants pioneered. So they're going to start taking these exact same paths, and they are going to end up in the exact same jails. And many of these immigration officials, who were once, like, very enthusiastic about cooperating and detaining Chinese migrants, are going to express sort of tremendous. This discomfort about the idea of detaining Europeans and in particular detaining European women and children. So we start to see this sort of calculation at the local level where this is a good deal. If you can sort of make this group of people a sort of Racialized, faceless, nameless collective that you're just detaining for profit. But when people are individualized, right, when there's a story about a mother and a three year old who are in this little jail for like two months, that upsets people, right? Like that, really, people start asking questions. It's more work for the sheriff. It is sort of not imagined as easy money in the same way. And so many communities start saying, we're actually not interested in working with the Immigration Service on this. This is not worth our trouble. So that creates a real challenge for the Immigration Service too, because now if their local collaborators do not want to place ball right, that puts them in a whole different position in terms of kind of figuring out what their detention spaces will look like for the coming decades.
- [34:22]
Eleanor Evans
Well, let's pause the evolution of some of these detention centres for a moment and we will turn to World War II. This is a milestone in this history in which the US has to think differently about how it detains certain groups of people within its borders. What can you tell us about this period and what does it mean for this history?
- [34:42]
Brianna Knofel
I think one of people's strongest associations when they think of detention in the United States is what happens to Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II when they are detained, you know, on a really enormous scale. It's an episode that fits, I think, somewhat uneasily in the history of immigration detention because some of these people are non citizens, but also the majority of them are citizens. So it was a challenge for me in sort of figuring out where does this actually, where does this fit? Because there, there's some continuity. Like, for example, they are using immigration agents to sort of raid Japanese communities. They realize that the Immigration Service is kind of the one agency that has extensive experience in detention. So they are very heavily relying on kind of their knowledge. But it's also different, right? There's like these new wartime agencies that are popping out of nowhere and it is imagined as a different task. Right? The US imagines that most of these Japanese Americans will reintegrate to the United States after the war, which is a really different experience than most of the people who they're detaining, who they imagine as the ultimate goal, is expulsion. So I think that one of the ways that we can sort of place Japanese American wartime incarceration in the larger story is not only sort of the way that it building on the systems and the skills that immigration agents have learned over the prior decades, but also after wartime incarceration ends, the United States now has Pretty expansive detention infrastructure that they can repurpose. So one of the things that happens is that the US takes, for example, this detention, wartime detention camp that they had been operating at Crystal City, Texas. They take the physical barracks and they move them closer to the border to a town called McAllen, Texas, and they basically start using the same physical space to facilitate mass deportations of Mexican workers. So the same workers that the US courted and desperately needed during wartime are going to be forced out in just deeply horrific ways following the war. It's so, I think, just sort of. Of poignant and devastating, right, that this sort of same physical space that had just held like citizens who were unjustly detained in war can now be used. It can just be repurposed. So I think it's like a really a good reminder, right, that all of these sort of carceral spaces that the US is developing, they're really fluid. They can be repurposed for kind of whatever project of control or so called security that is being deemed most pressing in the moment. And they can also be repurposed for citizens. Right. There is, I think, so much fluidity between the incarceration of citizens and the detention of non citizens through this whole story.
- [37:39]
Eleanor Evans
Can we go into this evolution a little more in terms of how the move towards mass incarceration in the United States is very entwined with this story of mass detention? And I wonder if I could ask particularly about your own sort of. Of pathway into this subject through Chrome as well.
- [37:56]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah. So Chrome is a massive immigration detention center. It is in the Florida Everglades. They're currently discussing building a second massive immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades right now. But this one, this one's been around since the 1980s. It was a missile testing site that the US repurposed as a site of migrant detention in the wake of the 1980 Mario boat lift, which is an episode where about 100,000 Cubans arrive in South, South Florida as asylum seekers over the course of a month, as well as tens of thousands of Haitian asylum seekers. So this is sort of. It's a massive catalyzing moment for the history of immigration detention. And one of the responses is this opening of this, this federally run. Basically it is in the middle of the swamp. It is like one little road takes you down to it. So I grew up not so far from Chrome, or that was how I got interested in this history. Originally chrome, in the 90s and the 2000, you know, it occupied a really uneasy place, I think, in the community. People knew it was there. Many people we knew had loved ones detained there. But there was like just sort of giant questions about what exactly this place was. It's like it looks like a prison and it sounds like a prison and it's like roughly as hard to access people, but also it's like not a prison. And I think like, when I look back at sort of like the confusion that I feel, like I certainly felt in learning about this space and it just sort of permeated everything. You're like, yeah, that's like the paradox at the heart of this, right. That it is that deportation, despite how punitive it is, is technically not a punishment and that this is administrative imprisonment. It is, the Supreme Court says In the late 19th century, it's not imprisonment in a legal sense. And you're like, what does that mean? Right? What does it mean if people are in cells, they cannot leave, they are being guarded, they are wearing jumpsuits, but it's not legally imprisonment. That is in many ways like even more potentially troubling people have, you know, and I never want to act like other forms of imprisonment are better than this, but this is even further sort of untethered from due process norms and protections. So that was how I got interested in it.
- [40:14]
Eleanor Evans
So we have chrome as a sort of a symbol of this, this mass project of federal placement of these migrant people. But then we also have the history of these small jails right alongside it. And I guess I wonder if you can just speak a bit more to the sort of pattern that seems to swing between these things eternally throughout your account and whether we are still in that pattern.
- [40:39]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah, it's an open question for the immigration service what the preferred model of incarceration is. So on the one hand they have sort of their traditional vision, which is we're going to contract with all of these localities. You know, we're going to. It's really fluid. If we pick up a bunch of people in X community, then we'll call that sheriff, we'll see if he can do this. And the advantages of that are that sheriffs are often excited about it. You know, it doesn't require them to open a new sort of immigration prison that's going to get all this attention and maybe be controversy. It's something they can do really quietly and it is something that essentially like gives them a footprint in every American community. So as migration routes change. Right. They can sort of move right along with it. So they see advantages to the jail based model. But by the later 20th century, the immigration Service, you know, it's better resourced, it has more money to experiment with new models of carceral control. And they're also just sort of tired of working with these sheriffs. They say, you know, this is a lot of negotiating and sometimes these sheriffs change their mind and sometimes they don't want to cooperate. And so they're, they're also, they have hesitations about the jail based model. What we start to see in the 80s with the opening of Chrome is that the immigration service is also interested in sort of how a big detention center, a big sort of federally run immigration prison can send a message. So part of the idea of Chrome is not just that it is a tool to, to facilitate deportations, but the Reagan administration in their sort of internal discussions is really explicit about their hope that this will be a deterrent to asylum seekers. That if people know that they're going to be sent to this pretty horrific sort of immigration prison in the swamp where you don't know what's going to happen to you, that this might stop people from coming altogether. And the US is particularly interested here in stopping migration from Haiti. They see Haitians asylum claims as like categorically invalid. Haiti isn't communist, which like massively disadvantages them in the US refugee system. And the US is also just very uneasy about sort of how its asylum system is changing in general. The US post World War II imagined asylum as like, you know, there are people in Europe in refugee camps and they wait for us to send for them. But what happens in the 80s, right, is that people from the Caribbean, these places that are not terribly far from the United States, are showing up at the United States, our beaches or airports and they're claiming asylum. And this is so deeply unsettling to the Reagan administration. And of course today it feels really familiar, right? This is how, you know, tens of thousands of people claim asylum at the southern border today by following the, this model. But their hope is that they can sort of stop this form of asylum seeking. And of course it doesn't work at all, right. It's tremendously ineffective in actually deterring people from seeking asylum. But I think it's an important idea, right, that sort of detention really isn't just a tool of removal. It is sort of a, it is a symbol and it is a threat. And so I think that is what makes these claims that it is non punitive feel just like particularly hollow.
- [43:59]
Eleanor Evans
You've given us the sense then, Brianna, of such an evolution of this history, but also a through line that not a Lot has changed in that a lot of these debates are still very live and how this detention system was conceived in the early 20th century, late 19th century. Things haven't moved on a whole bunch. I'm interested, as we begin to wrap up up, whether you'd agree with that assessment of your account and also given the stat view of more than 50,000 undocumented migrants detained right now, what you would like people to be bearing in mind with this century long history in the current day.
- [44:38]
Brianna Knofel
Yeah, I don't think this is a particularly uplifting history. This is really a story. I think it's a story of a lot of continuity. It is a story about sort of of these enduring financial arrangements that allow people to produce huge amounts of revenue off of this group of people who the US Claims they're so deeply unhappy to have here. And I think the big continuity is sort of the ways that the system and the idea of mass deportation has really relied on many, many people working together and on getting the sort of consent of localities. And so when you look at sort of of how the current administration is approaching deportation, they're putting a lot of resources into encouraging local law enforcement to do this work. And that is something that the Immigration Service has been trying to refine for a century. How do we sort of increase the number of people who are empowered to do the labor of border control? I think that one of the things that feels really important to me is that we sort of don't disconnect the story of immigration detention in the United States from the sort of broader history of mass incarceration. So, you know, throughout this history, there are people who are pushing against this system. And one of the most sort of common ways that people push back against immigration detention is they say, you know, these people are not the real criminals. All they've done is crossed a line, right? All they've done that they're sort of particularly innocent or they are particularly deserving of humane conditions in a way that these other people in the jail are imagined as not right. They are sort of posed as these opposites, like these are the innocent good immigrants who didn't really do anything wrong. These are the bad real criminals who like, you know, deserve this horrific jail. This is, I think, just like really it's not a great idea for a lot of reasons, but also becomes much Messier as the 20th century progresses and as the US US criminalizes border crossing. So part of, I think the big shift we see is that the US has made this group of people by sort of strict legal definition criminal. It is now it has a criminal thing to charge them with. So the sort of line of where criminality is is blurrier. But it also, I think, you know, I think there's so much risk to sort of positioning immigrants as the ones who don't deserve, like no one deserves, the conditions of American jails and prisons. Like any sort of approach to reforming this requires that we do not sort of pit these groups against each other, that we sort of see them all as sort of deserving of basic human dignity and deserving of just a system that does not look like this and does not treat people like this. That is one of the big takeaways for me is that we cannot dismantle immigration detention without sort of dismantling the system of mass incarceration more broadly.
- [47:38]
History Extra Host
That was Brianna Knofel speaking to Eleanor Evans. Brianna is assistant professor of history at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and her book is the Migrants An American History of Mass Incarceration.