The Business of Migrant Detention

0:00Brianna Nofil:Are you that friend? The one who's constantly recommending podcast episodes to anyone who will listen? Subscribe to NPR's Pod Club newsletter and nerd out with us. You'll get fresh podcast recommendations every week, handpicked by the people that live for this stuff. Subscribe at npr.org slash podclub. You can also find the link in the description for this episode. Now, on to the show. In 1903, a reporter named Pulteney Bigelow stumbled across a story in upstate New York. The part of New York that is right along the Canadian border. A rural town in Franklin County called Malone, where he starts talking with locals.

0:44And they tell him this route from Canada into northern New York has become this sort of vastly underreported, secret passage of a legal entry into the United States for Chinese migrants. Like, why is that a pathway? Is it easier to get into Canada at that time? Yeah, it's a super intentional choice. So this is about 20 years after the U.S. passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which bars Chinese laborers basically entirely from legal immigration to the United States. So for many Chinese migrants who are still looking for a path in, this is one of their best options. Oh, interesting. They take a boat to Vancouver.

1:25They take a train across the entire length of Canada. They stop over in Montreal, where there are Chinese communities that coach them, that help them cross the border. And then they cross this just incredibly rural, isolated sort of path into northern New York. That takes us back to the reporter, Pultney Bigelow, who starts asking around. and people in Malone tell him, go look at the county jail. He arrives at the county jail and the county jail is filled, is packed to the brim with Chinese migrants. The sheriff took me into the jail where were about 30 Chinamen awaiting trial. They basically stashed people in the attic of this jail, which was never intended to hold people at all.

2:14In the yard was a massive refuse that never would have been allowed to accumulate in a decent family. He is sort of stunned by what he sees. There were no outdoor recreation grounds, no place for a daily walk. Two of the big window panes were broken and had been repaired by stuffing in old rags or newspapers. It's a sort of quite brutal form of warehousing from its earliest incarnations. And Bigelow writes in his dispatch, right, he says these people are not being held because they're accused of committing a crime. These are not the people we expect to find in a local jail, right? He says they are being held administratively by the immigration service because they are awaiting immigration hearings and they are awaiting potential deportations.

3:00We put them in jail first and let them prove their innocence afterward. And these are words coming from a guy who doesn't necessarily like Chinese people. In the same article, he makes it very clear he believes in white supremacy, but he also believed the immigration system wasn't working like it should. So he says there's like something really strange happening here, something that does not resemble how we sort of imagine the U.S. criminal justice system operating in any way. I have no hesitation in pronouncing our present means of excluding Chinamen as one gigantic and complicated fraud. These people aren't accused of anything, but they are sitting in our jails for months on end.

3:41Brianna Nofil:This is Brianna Nofill. I'm an assistant professor of history at William & Mary, and my book is called The Migrant's Jail, An American History of Mass Incarceration. Brianna grew up in South Florida, near a federal immigration detention center. People would say, there's folks out there, it's down this one little road that goes into the Everglades, it's kind of like a prison, but it's kind of not. It's called Chrome. It was an old missile base turned into a migrant detention facility in the 1980s. As an adult, Brianna got interested in what it was used for, who ran it, who lived there. So I really started with that question of like, what was this weird place in our community?

4:23And it kind of spiraled out from there.

4:27Brianna Nofil:And what she found was that for as long as the federal government has restricted immigration, it struggled to find enough space, which is why it's often relied on local county jails in rural communities like the one in Franklin County, New York, to help them out. Part of the utility of using local jails is that these spaces already exist. Basically, every county has a local jail of some sort. So if you are dealing with routes that are shifting, if you are dealing with laws that are changing and targeting different groups of people, The idea that you can just basically have a detention footprint in every community in America is really, really intriguing.

5:10Brianna Nofil:Today, the U.S. has an expansive immigration detention system spread out over federal facilities, private prisons, state prisons and county jails. And it's exploded under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Now the Trump administration wants to find or build the space to detain at least 100 ,000 immigrants on any given night. And it has$45 billion allocated in the one big beautiful bill to do it. It just needs a lot more partners. State of Indiana has just become the latest state to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security and open an ICE detention facility and has been given the nickname the Speedway Slammer.

5:52A new ICE facility being called the Cornhusker Clink is opening in Nebraska. Alligator Alcatraz is being dismantled. Florida will open a second detention center. It's not Alligator Alcatraz, it's Deportation Depot. A major new immigration detention facility has quietly opened in California's Mojave Desert.

6:10Brianna Nofil:I'm Ramteen Adab-Louis. And I'm Randab Nifetah on this episode of ThruLine, the business of migrant detention. Hi, my name is Susan Rosez. Although I was born and raised here, I spent the last 20 years living outside the United States. And ThruLine has really helped me understand the current situation in the United States and to feel like I have a place here. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

6:42Part One, The Collaborator. When you think of the landscape of immigration at the turn of the 20th century, there's big immigration sites like Ellis Island. Maybe folks have heard of Angel Island in San Francisco. These are the U.S.'s kind of main immigration stations. But there's no real plan for what happens if they all start entering through some obscure little route in northern New York. And this is the situation that the reporter Pulteney Bigelow stumbled across in 1903, when he discovered that the local jail in rural Franklin County, New York, was overcrowded with Chinese migrants, awaiting hearings to determine whether they'd be deported or allowed into the United States.

7:27And the local sheriff was happy to have them. The sheriff is a guy named Ernest Douglas. He's a pretty standard, ordinary rural sheriff. He's got a big mustache and a big hat and he's got a long career in law enforcement. But I think that his incentives are incredibly clear. It was about money. Sheriffs in most of the country at this point in history operated on something called a fee system. So they didn't get an annual salary. Your salary as sheriff would have depended on how many sort of sheriff-related tasks you did. You get a payment for like how many summonses you send. But sort of the number, the backbone of your income was how many people you held in the local jail.

8:11So your salary was directly dependent on that. So once he finds that he can start detaining immigrants, right, at the behest of the federal government, this is a pretty spectacular new income source for the sheriff. Personally. Yeah, personally, right. It's not even money going into the local economy at this point. It is money the sheriff is personally pocketing. So some reports say he makes like$20 ,000 in three years, which is a lot of money for a sheriff. How long are these prisoners there? The average detention in northern New York, it hovers around three months. It's way longer than migrants were detained on average.

8:52And when you think about the conditions that they were in, these are not spaces designed for long-term detentions. They are not spaces that were ever designed to hold immigrants. But not only was Sheriff Douglas making money for every person he held in jail, Pulteney Bigelow reported that it was easy money. And he says, when I talked to the sheriff, the sheriff didn't seem disturbed at all by the number of Chinese migrants coming through Malone. In fact, he seems delighted. His exact line is he treats the Chinese migrants as pets. The householders like them and they would like to have more of them.

9:28My friends about the jail praised their general cleanliness, industry, docility. There are never any fights among them, no quarreling. They give no trouble to anyone. These were people who were locked up not because they committed a violent crime. They were jailed for trying to enter the U.S. illegally. So they were kind of ideal inmates that were bringing in consistent cash for Sheriff Douglas. The sheriff has very little incentive to make this a better situation. But soon, there would be a problem for Sheriff Douglas. All of these Chinese migrants, basically to the person, while they're detained in Malone, are filing habeas corpus claims.

10:10Habeas corpus claims are where detainees can challenge their detention in court, essentially saying they're being unlawfully detained. And how are they claiming that? They are saying that they are American citizens. Oh, interesting. And they're saying they are being illegally detained because they are American citizens. This was actually a popular legal strategy at the time, even though very few of them were actually American citizens. But they realized the courts had very little sort of evidence to just prove that they were American citizens. So one of the other remarkable things that you can see in sort of the jail ledgers is that even though these people are being detained for so long, very few of them are actually being deported.

10:50Almost all of them win their legal cases and leave Malone and go into the United States. You can imagine that most migrants who were making this journey probably had in their minds that they would be jailed, that this jailing was part of what it took to get into the United States. But that eventually, if they could stick through this miserable couple months, that the U.S. government actually didn't really have the ammunition to deny them entry.

11:20Brianna Nofil:Federal officials were upset at what was happening in Malone. They mostly blamed the commissioners making these decisions. But they also thought there might be some other kind of corruption happening. And they wanted other places to detain the growing number of Chinese migrants coming across the border. What we start to see is that the Immigration Service starts calling sheriffs and neighboring communities and saying, would you guys also like to hold some Chinese migrants? And this is where things get really testy. we basically start to see these counties competing with each other and making arguments for like why you should send chinese migrants to my county and not my neighbor and one of the things that they do to sort of up the ante and how they compete is that they start building separate segregated jails so rather than putting chinese migrants in the sort of regular local jail they build what they call Chinese jails.

12:15So they can say, look, we have this like brand new facility just for your detention needs. So, you know, please keep sending migrants through our county and not through our neighbors. So you really see the emergence of a market.

12:29Brianna Nofil:This market wasn't just the 50 cents a day that sheriffs got for each detainee. There was money going into the local economy for food, jobs, witnesses coming through, staying at hotels who would testify in the hearings. one newspaper estimated that Malone would lose around$50 ,000 a year if, quote, Chinese business moved east. And it did. During this period in the early 1900s, four New York counties were benefiting from these deals with the federal government. It is actively commoditizing people. And, you know, the people who are making money off of this see that. They are fighting for these contracts from the federal government.

13:09Brianna Nofil:But in 1904, things would start to change. The U.S. government brought a case against 32 Chinese people detained in Malone, challenging their habeas corpus claims. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the government, giving the Department of Commerce and Labor the power to deport them. The department had taken over administration of U.S. immigration the year before, since most immigration laws were meant to protect American workers. People have real ethical and moral quandaries about this. People are uncomfortable from the very beginning, even in places like Malone, about what is happening here.

13:51And I think that sort of public concern spikes when deaths happen while people are awaiting these hearings and deportations. Three of the Chinamen detained here died last week at the detention house. There have been 120 or 130 in the place. And after two had died out of this number, which was a pretty large death rate, others being ill, Dr. Wilding was asked to investigate. He found three of them dangerously sick and a large number ailing. One of the three died the next morning after being removed to more favorable quarters. The Malone Farmer, January 1904.

14:27Brianna Nofil:Chinese men detained in the jail wrote a letter pleading for help that said, quote, There are many deaths in this wooden detention house. A total of 17 Chinese men would die in Franklin County facilities before the Supreme Court ruling. So this is a quote from a newspaper called The Malone Farmer. The present Chinese exclusion law and its administration is a shame upon civilized government. And they go on to say there ought to be some other way of handling them other than placing them behind locked doors and barred windows. As illegal entries slowed down along the northern New York border, some counties which had relied on money from the federal government made pleas to bring back Chinese detainees.

15:13St. Lawrence County, just to the west of Franklin County, went as far as to adopt a resolution claiming they were being discriminated against by not receiving more Chinese immigrants. Franklin and other neighboring counties would continue detaining people into the early 20th century. but never at the level they first did. Once enough people find out that this migration route is a thing, it's kind of a good indication that it's time to move on. So right around this period, too, we're going to see most Chinese migrants are going to start entering through Mexico rather than Canada. What does it foreshadow about the future of migrant detention in the United States?

15:56I think what it foreshadows is that the immigration service in these years, but also today, their mandate is gargantuan. Their task at the turn of the 20th century is to bar Chinese immigrants from this huge country. They're incredibly, incredibly small as an agency. They realize that in order to make deportations happen, they need collaborators. And some of their best collaborators, the collaborators they are most interested in pursuing, is sheriffs and local law enforcement.

16:33Brianna Nofil:Coming up, things get tense when the federal government opens its own sites in rural America. Hello, this is Kendra from Hampton, Georgia, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I love your show so much because I always feel like when I listen to the show, I'm getting a more complex understanding of the history, not just one side. Part two, the prison business. In August of 1948, a woman named Ellen Knopf was detained at Ellis Island. At first, no one knew why immigration officials considered her a security risk, and she wasn't given a hearing. It was the start of the Cold War, and the United States was worried about who was coming into the country.

17:31Brianna Nofil:The Department of Justice now oversaw immigration in the U.S., hoping it would provide better oversight than the Department of Labor. The sort of Ellis Island that we think of is of distant memory. This is Brianna Nofil, author of The Migrant's Jail, an American history of mass incarceration. It is basically, by the 40s, a site of long-term detention for people who the U.S. fears are subversive. Communists, fascists, or people like Ellen Knopf. Knopf was German-born, but left when Hitler rose to power. She would eventually end up a refugee in England, serving in the Royal Air Force, where she met and married an American serviceman, and then found herself stuck on Ellis Island and in the middle of a controversy.

18:20Brianna Nofil:Why was the government detaining Knopf without disclosing why? And she kind of becomes this celebrity, emblematic of the excesses of detention power. Ellis Island, by this time in the late 1940s, had become less of a processing center granting access to the country, and more of a detention center where people would stay months, or in the case of Ellen Knopf, two years, while awaiting a court hearing. Activists are going to use the language of, this is totally at odds with everything we are claiming about civil liberties in the United States in this early Cold War moment. Knopf's case would eventually make it all the way to the U.S.

19:01Brianna Nofil:Supreme Court, which ruled that the U.S. government could deny Knopf entry and didn't have to disclose why. But pressure continued, and after almost two years of being detained, she was granted an immigration hearing, where witnesses testified she was a communist spy. But the evidence didn't hold up, and in November of 1951, she left Ellis Island, admitted for permanent residence. Dressed in a powder blue suit and a dark blue top coat, she boarded the ferry that left Ellis Island at 7.30 o 'clock. Ten minutes later, reporters and photographers gathered around her as a ferry birthed at the Manhattan Pier, the New York Times.

19:41Brianna Nofil:Knopf's story happened under President Harry Truman. But in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower's administration would take immigration policy in a new direction. And they make this statement. They say we are only going to use immigration detention in very exceptional circumstances. Those circumstances included detaining people who were, quote, likely to abscond or those whose freedom of movement could be adverse to the national security or the public's safety. I've got the quote from Eisenhower. He says, through humane administration, the Department of Justice is doing what it legally can to alleviate hardships.

20:25And he says the imprisonment of aliens awaiting admission or deportation has been stopped.

20:32Brianna Nofil:Instead, immigrants coming to the U.S. would be released on, quote, conditional parole or bond or supervision. Breanna says this move by Eisenhower reminded her of what happened after the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which set quotas for how many people could enter from a particular country. At the time, the U.S. was worried about the influx of immigrants after World War I, significantly from Eastern European countries, but also from Asian and other non-white countries too. But what we start to see changing is that many of these sheriffs and these jails are not excited about the prospect of incarcerating European migrants.

21:12And they are particularly not excited about the idea of incarcerating European women and children. They say this is bringing us all sorts of bad publicity. This isn't worth it, right? The money is not worth all the negative publicity.

21:27Brianna Nofil:Money and bad publicity were reasons why Eisenhower wanted to stop long-term immigration detention in the mid-50s. This is a major sea change. And I think in a lot of ways, scholars have looked to this as a sort of hopeful moment, right? If you're trying to kind of imagine what a world without immigration detention might look like, It's really quite powerful that the president essentially declared that he was discontinuing this practice altogether. And instead, paroling people into the U.S. while their immigration status was pending. But there is, as there often is, a really big caveat.

22:07Even as Eisenhower is proclaiming this era of humane immigration administration, He is really only talking about places like Ellis Island, places that mostly deal with Europeans. Detention is rapidly expanding on the southern border. After World War II, Mexican migrants became a target of deportation. They had been encouraged to come to the U.S. legally during the war through the Bracero program, which allowed them to work on farms, planting and harvesting crops. But the agricultural industry also hired Mexican migrants who had entered illegally so they could pay them less. Now, in 1954, the Eisenhower administration began what would become the largest deportation campaign in U.S.

22:56history, known as Operation Wetback, a derogatory racial epithet widely used at the time. The roundup of Wetback swung into its second day today with the first day's catch of more than 2 ,000 illegal immigrants termed very successful. Evening Vanguard, June 18, 1954. It kind of embodies the, I think, some of like the hypocrisy at the core of this because the U.S., you know, invites tens of thousands of Mexican laborers to come to the country during the war, right? To sort of fill these absolutely critical agricultural labor needs. When it decides it does not need this group of people anymore, right?

23:36Virtually overnight, they become illegal. So then how did the Eisenhower administration claim that the United States government is ending detention? So the Immigration Service is quite intentional. The federal government data on Mexican detention was not consistent, and officials would sometimes categorize Mexican migrants separately to make the point that they'd abolished detention. They're often seen as sort of not really immigrants. The Immigration Service sees immigrants as people who come and stay permanently, and they see Mexicans as seasonal workers. They see Mexicans as people who come and go.

24:17But the Immigration Service is able to say, this is like a separate category of person that doesn't really count for what we're doing. The Justice Department and its Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, have been trying for a few years to convince Congress to give them more money to ramp up detentions and deportations of Mexican migrants along the border. And this included building federal detention centers. And they wanted to put one near the southern tip of Texas, in the city of Brownsville, which already had contracts with the feds to hold migrants in its jail. So when they announced plans to build this federal camp in Brownsville, the government is pretty shocked that they get so much pushback from localities.

25:04Some of it is about conditions, some of it is about the morality, but a lot of it is localities saying, listen, we built bigger jails in our communities because the immigration service told us they needed that space. Much of the opposition to the building of a federal detention camp is based on the claim that county jails have expended money to enlarge the jails and improve the facilities to meet federal requirements. The Brownsville Herald. Congressman Lloyd Benson, whose district covered Brownsville, addressed Congress, saying that counties will be, quote, left holding the bag because the Immigration Bureau decides it wants to increase its staff and duties and go into the prison business on a grandiose scale.