Pod Insights Throughline The Business of Migrant Detention About this episode The U. S. immigration detention system is spread out across federal facilities, private prisons, state prisons, and county jails. It’s grown under both Democratic and Republican presidents. And it’s been offered up as a source of revenue for over a century, beginning with the first contracts between the federal government and sheriffs along the Canadian border.
Guests:
Brianna Nofil, assistant professor of history at The College of William and Mary author of The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration
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Transcript 8,647 words · 26 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:43 Speaker 02 In 1903, a reporter named Polteny Bigelow stumbled across a story in upstate New York.
0:50 Speaker 03 The part of New York that is right along the Canadian border.
0:55 Speaker 02 A rural town in Franklin County called Malone, where he starts talking with locals.
1:02 Speaker 03 And they tell him this route from Canada into northern New York has become this sort of vastly underreported, secret passage of illegal entry into the United States for Chinese migrants.
1:16 Speaker 02 Like, why is that a pathway? Is it easier to get into Canada at that time?
1:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a super intentional choice. So this is about 20 years after the US 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.
1:38 Speaker 02 Wow, interesting.
1:40 Speaker 03 They take a boat to Vancouver, they 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.
2:02 Speaker 02 That takes us back to the reporter, Paul Nee Bigelow, who starts asking around. And people in Malone tell him, go look at the county jail.
2:11 Speaker 03 He arrives at the county jail, and the county jail is filled, is packed to the brim with Chinese migrants.
2:19 Speaker 04 The sheriff took me into the jail, where were about 30 Chinamen awaiting trial.
2:24 Speaker 03 They basically stashed people in the attic of this jail, which was never intended to hold people at all.
2:32 Speaker 04 In the yard was a massive refuse that never would have been allowed to accumulate in a decent family.
2:37 Speaker 03 He is sort of stunned by what he sees.
2:40 Speaker 04 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.
2:50 Speaker 03 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.
3:18 Speaker 04 We put them in jail first and let them prove their innocence afterward.
3:23 Speaker 02 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.
3:36 Speaker 03 So he says there is like something really strange happening here, something that does not resemble how we sort of imagine the US criminal justice system operating in any way.
3:46 Speaker 04 I have no hesitation in pronouncing our present means of excluding Chinamen as one gigantic and complicated fraud.
3:53 Speaker 03 These people aren't accused of anything, but they are sitting in our jails for months on end.
3:59 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Brianna Nofil.
4:01 Speaker 03 I'm an assistant professor of history at William & Mary, and my book is called The Migrants Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration.
4:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Brianna grew up in South Florida, near a federal immigration detention center.
4:14 Speaker 03 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."
4:22 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
4:35 Speaker 03 So I really started with that question of like, what was this weird place in our community? And it kind of spiraled out from there.
4:45 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
5:02 Speaker 03 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.
5:28 Rund Abdelfatah? Today, the US 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.
5:59 Speaker 05 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.
6:09 Speaker 06 A new ICE facility being called the Cornhusker Clink is opening in Nebraska.
6:14 Speaker 07 Alligator Alcatraz is being dismantled. Florida will open a second detention center.
6:19 Speaker 08 It's not Alligator Alcatraz, it's Deportation Depot. A major new immigration detention facility has quietly opened in California's Mojave Desert.
6:28 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. On this episode of Throughline, the business of migrant detention.
6:39 Speaker 09 Hi, my name is Susan Rozas. Although I was born and raised here, I spent the last 20 years living outside the United States. And Throughline 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 Throughline from NPR.
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7:41 Speaker 10 bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback. This message comes from Quo. You're on a job, in a meeting, slammed, and a customer calls. If nobody picks up, they go to your competitor. That's why over 90,000 companies choose Quo. The business phone system built for busy teams. Smart call routing sends calls to the right person. Shared numbers let your team cover for each other.
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8:35 Speaker 03 Part one, The Collaborator.
8:39 Speaker 03 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 US'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.
9:01 Speaker 02 And this is the situation that the reporter Poltny 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. And the local sheriff was happy to have them.
9:23 Speaker 03 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.
9:40 Speaker 02 It was about money.
9:42 Speaker 03 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. So 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.
10:17 Speaker 02 Personally.
10:19 Speaker 03 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.
10:32 Speaker 02 How long are these prisoners there?
10:35 Speaker 03 The average detention in northern New York, it hovers around three months. It's way longer than migrants were detained on average. And 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.
10:54 Speaker 02 But not only was Sheriff Douglas making money for every person he held in jail, Polten Bigelow reported that it was easy money.
11:02 Speaker 03 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.
11:18 Speaker 04 The householders like them, and they would like to have more of them. My 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."
11:30 Speaker 02 These were people who were locked up not because they committed a violent crime. They were jailed for trying to enter the US illegally. So they were kind of ideal inmates that were bringing in consistent cash for Sheriff Douglas.
11:45 Speaker 03 The sheriff has very little incentive to make this a better situation.
11:50 Speaker 02 But soon, there would be a problem for Sheriff Douglas.
11:55 Speaker 03 All of these Chinese migrants, basically to the person while they're detained in Malone, are filing habeas corpus claims.
12:02 Speaker 02 Habeas corpus claims are where detainees can challenge their detention in court, essentially saying they're being unlawfully detained. And how are they claiming that?
12:12 Speaker 03 They are saying that they are American citizens.
12:15 Speaker 02 Oh, interesting.
12:15 Speaker 03 And they're saying they are being illegally detained because they are American citizens.
12:20 Speaker 02 This was actually a popular legal strategy at the time, even though very few of them were actually American citizens.
12:27 Speaker 03 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. Almost all of them win their legal cases and leave Malone and go into the United States.
12:51 Speaker 03 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 of months, that the US government actually didn't really have the ammunition to deny them entry.
13:12 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
13:29 Speaker 03 What we start to see is that the immigration service starts calling sheriffs in neighboring communities and saying, would you guys also like to hold some Chinese migrants? And this is where things get really testy.
13:43 Speaker 03 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 in 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. So 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.
14:22 Rund Abdelfatah? 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."
14:43 Rund Abdelfatah? And it did. During this period in the early 1900s, four New York counties were benefiting from these deals with the federal government.
14:51 Speaker 03 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.
15:02 Rund Abdelfatah? But in 1904, things would start to change. The US 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 US immigration the year before, since most immigration laws were meant to protect American workers.
15:31 Speaker 03 People have a real ethical and moral quandaries about this. People are uncomfortable from the very beginning, even in places like Malone, about what is happening here. And I think that sort of public concern spikes when deaths happen, while people are awaiting these hearings and deportations.
15:52 Speaker 11 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.
16:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Chinese men detained in the jail wrote a letter pleading for help that said, quote, "There are many deaths in this wooden detention house."
16:29 Rund Abdelfatah? A total of 17 Chinese men would die in Franklin County facilities before the Supreme Court ruling.
16:38 Speaker 03 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."
16:55 Speaker 02 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. St. Lawrence County, just to the west of Franklin County, went as far as to adopt their 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.
17:26 Speaker 03 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.
17:42 Speaker 02 What does it foreshadow about the future of migrant detention in the United States?
17:49 Speaker 03 I 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.
18:26 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, things get tense when the federal government opens its own sites in rural America.
18:35 Speaker 12 Hello, this is Kendra from Hampton, Georgia, and you're listening to Throughline 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.
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20:16 Rund Abdelfatah? Part Two, The Prison Business. In August of 1948, a woman named Ellen Knopf was detained at Ellis Island.
20:27 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. The Department of Justice now oversaw immigration in the US, hoping it would provide better oversight than the Department of Labor.
20:48 Speaker 03 The sort of Ellis Island that we think of is of distant memory.
20:53 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Brianna Nofil, author of "The Migrants Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration."
20:59 Speaker 03 It is basically, by the 40s, a site of long-term detention for people who the US fears are subversive.
21:08 Rund Abdelfatah? Communists, fascists, or people like Ellen Noff. Noff 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. Why was the government detaining Noff without disclosing why?
21:34 Speaker 03 And she kind of becomes this celebrity, emblematic of the excesses of detention power.
21:41 Rund Abdelfatah? 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 Noff, two years, while awaiting a court hearing.
21:58 Speaker 03 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."
22:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Noff's case would eventually make it all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the US government could deny Noff 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.
22:35 Speaker 13 Dressed in a powder-blue suit and a dark-blue topcoat, she boarded the ferry that left Ellis Island at 7:30 o'clock. 10 minutes later, reporters and photographers gathered around her as the ferry berthed at the Manhattan Pier. The New York Times.
22:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Noff's story happened under President Harry Truman. But in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower's administration would take immigration policy in a new direction.
23:03 Speaker 03 And they make this statement. They say, "We are only going to use immigration detention in very exceptional circumstances."
23:13 Rund Abdelfatah? 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 safety.
23:25 Speaker 03 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." And he says, "The imprisonment of aliens awaiting admission or deportation has been stopped."
23:42 Rund Abdelfatah? Instead, immigrants coming to the US would be released on, quote, "conditional parole or bond or supervision." Brianna 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 US 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.
24:13 Speaker 03 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. And 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."
24:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Money and bad publicity were reasons why Eisenhower wanted to stop long-term immigration detention in the mid-'50s.
24:44 Speaker 03 This is a major sea change.
24:47 Speaker 03 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.
25:03 Rund Abdelfatah? And instead, paroling people into the US while their immigration status was pending.
25:09 Speaker 03 But there is, you know, as there often is, right? A really big caveat.
25:17 Speaker 03 Even 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.
25:35 Speaker 02 After World War II, Mexican migrants became a target of deportation. They had been encouraged to come to the US 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 US history, known as Operation Wetback, a derogatory racial epithet widely used at the time.
26:13 Speaker 11 The roundup of wetbacks 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.
26:26 Speaker 03 It kind of embodies the, I think, some of the hypocrisy at the core of this because the US 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, virtually overnight, they become illegal.
26:51 Speaker 02 So then how did the Eisenhower administration claim that the United States government is ending detention?
26:58 Speaker 03 So the immigration service is quite intentional.
27:01 Speaker 02 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.
27:13 Speaker 03 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. But 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."
27:36 Speaker 02 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.
28:03 Speaker 03 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. Some of it is about condition, 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."
28:28 Speaker 14 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.
28:42 Speaker 02 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." It seemed like everything was working against the federal government's proposal in Brownsville. There were even contests in the local newspaper to name the detention center, with names like Mexicali Catras or Sultry Siberia.
29:16 Speaker 03 And then shortly after that, a newspaper in Odessa gives what I think is another just sort of incredibly prescient quote about what was to come. They say, quote, "Now, apparently, these counties are stuck with big jails and nobody to put in them but each other. The Immigration Service and the Border Patrol prefer a concentration camp of their own."
29:38 Speaker 02 In this case, this doesn't sound like an economic benefit to the local community or to any particular sheriff or one person. And it also sounds like they're spending, the federal government's spending a ton of money on this. Is it just for political reasons? Who is benefiting ultimately economically? Or is anyone benefiting economically from this process?
29:59 Speaker 03 It's a great question, right? So they would, they would claim that this is an economically driven decision. They would claim they are protecting American farm workers. They would claim that this is, you know, critical for, for the future of agricultural labor. But I think you see on the ground in terms of sort of how communities feel about this, it's, it's really contentious. It's contentious, not only because of the questions about we could be making all this money off our jail, but many growers in South Texas are incredibly resistant to these mass deportation efforts. There's sort of countless stories about growers like pulling guns on immigration agents or sort of putting boards with nails around their property to try to kind of puncture the tires of anyone who might try to carry out an immigration
30:44 Speaker 03 raid on their facilities. And some of the most critical voices of the conditions at these detention camps are these big agricultural players in South Texas. And, you know, I think we should always sort of look a little side-eyed to them. Like, they, they're often putting it in really moralistic terms, but they have a really strong financial incentive to keep this, you know, inexpensive labor that they have depended on for decades and decades.
31:10 Speaker 14 No one has given a good reason, and certainly none has been advanced, for the construction of a stockade in which to herd the aliens, whose only crime has been their desire to come to this country to make a living working on valley farms and to aid in the economy of this area. The Brownsville Herald.
31:29 Speaker 02 There was so much pushback to the site in Brownsville that the federal government backed out of the plan and looked for another location, which it found in the city of McAllen, about 60 mile drive west from Brownsville. McAllen welcomed the site, even paying for some of the infrastructure itself. And when it opened in April of 1953, it became a major hub of migrant detention and deportation for Operation Wetback. How does this represent a turning point in migrant detention in US history?
32:02 Speaker 03 I think it's important that we see that the federal government is willing to build its own deportation infrastructure. They've also realized, I think really notably, that these long-term detentions of Europeans got a ton of sort of, you know, activists, the ACLU is involved, like, people are really upset about these folks. People are not as upset about, you know, thousands of sort of nameless, imagined as like faceless Mexican migrants who are cycling through these sites. That is seen as sort of not as, not as offensive, I think, to a lot of Americans. So, you know, for an agency that is trying to figure out
32:45 Speaker 03 the boundaries of what is politically viable, what sort of administrative incarceration can you run without everyone accusing you of like having a gulag? I think they basically start to realize they have just more wiggle room on the southwest border. They can build this infrastructure and not have every American outraged about it.
33:10 Speaker 02 What I take away too is like, this is a major insertion of the federal government into this game. By game, I mean this business. This is becoming a show now.
33:18 Speaker 03 I think it is, right? And I think the other thing that we start to see that's going to become really important in the years to come is that they start really imagining detention as something that might deter people from coming altogether. If people know that they're going to come here and they're going to have this sort of miserable limbo period where they are incarcerated, right, where they're going to suffer, that maybe this is a thing we can use to deter migration more broadly.
33:47 Speaker 02 But what's fascinating about this, though, is that... In Franklin County, many of the Chinese immigrants kind of just saw it as a rite of passage into the United States. Why do they think that suddenly people are not going to view it that way that are coming into the country from Mexico?
34:02 Speaker 03 They say, well, these detentions are really short. And for the most part, they are really short. This is not the case at Franklin County, where there's legal action, where you might be able to see a judge, where you might have some semblance of rights. So most of these people are only going to stay in these detention camps for like, you know, one, two, three nights. The US is just deporting more people. It is more successful in removing people.
34:30 Speaker 02 There was a period of more liberal immigration policy in the 1960s. The national quota law was abolished and deportations overall went down. But that didn't stop people from illegally entering the US. And in just a couple of decades, illegal entry to the US was about to blow up.
34:49 Speaker 03 I think there is sort of a thread here that is like, any of these things that the US government does, whether it's a law barring every single person from a country or whether it is sort of unprecedented energy into these raids and mass deportations in the Southwest. Like, none of this actually fundamentally cuts off people's access to migrant labor and none of this fundamentally completely stops people from migrating.
35:15 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, the golden handcuffs of migrant detention.
35:30 Speaker 15 Hi, this is Reza calling from Tehran, Iran. It's a blessing to listen to a proofread podcast at these turbulent times. This is a through line from the NPR. Thank you.
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37:03 Speaker 16 Part Three: A Pillar of Mass Incarceration.
37:09 Speaker 16 A standoff continues tonight in Oakdale, Louisiana, where hundreds of Cubans held at a federal detention center are holding at least 20 guards hostage.
37:18 Speaker 17 The inmates have been communicating some of their demands on hand-painted signs.
37:22 Speaker 18 Officials don't know exactly how many hostages there are or even who they are. No list has been compiled.
37:28 Speaker 17 There has been no change in negotiations. Talks are not yet scheduled to resume.
37:33 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1987, Cuban immigrants detained in two facilities, one in Atlanta and another in a small rural community of Oakdale, Louisiana, took over their detention centers, holding guards hostage in both locations.
37:48 Speaker 19 Most of these Cubans came to this country seven years ago in the Mariel boatlift.
37:52 Rund Abdelfatah? The US had welcomed refugees coming over on the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when tens of thousands of Cuban immigrants fled Castro's repressive government to seek asylum. Many of them had become permanent residents in the US.
38:06 Speaker 03 But one of the populations that is going to sort of prove to be particularly... Troubling for the immigration service is Cubans who have an interaction with the criminal justice system in the US, who are convicted of a crime. So in theory, the US wants to deport these people back to Cuba, but Castro sort of hard line refuses to take them.
38:30 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Brianna Nofil, author of The Migrant Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration.
38:36 Speaker 03 So what that means is that the US now has a population of people who have finished their criminal sentence, who are now being held administratively as migrant detainees, but for whom there is no path to deportation, right? So it raises this really important and really thorny question of can the US hold people indefinitely?
39:00 Rund Abdelfatah? The US government had been preparing for something like this. A few years before these 1987 uprisings, the federal government, led by a young associate attorney general named Rudy Giuliani, had secured funding to build permanent detention centers, a collaboration between the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Bureau of Prisons. Now, they just needed somewhere to build them.
39:27 Speaker 20 This week, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service opened a new detention center in rural Oakdale, Louisiana.
39:34 Speaker 21 About 200 miles from New Orleans.
39:36 Speaker 03 The Oakdale mayor launches this all-out effort to get this site for his community.
39:43 Speaker 22 After the furniture factories left, the paper bag plant went out of business, and the lumber mill closed. This town was dying.
39:49 Speaker 03 This sort of town sees itself as needing a sort of financial silver bullet, and they say this immigration detention center is going to be it.
39:58 Speaker 21 Helping to lower unemployment, which had been the highest in the country.
40:01 Speaker 03 Oakdale is hosting all-night prayer vigils to pray that the immigration service puts the detention center in this community. They are hosting these, like, Cajun cookouts that they're inviting immigration officials to. And immigration officials basically cannot believe their luck, right? They're like, this is not going to be as hard as we thought. If we can pitch this as a financial solution...
40:25 Speaker 22 That made Mayor George Moad fight hard to bring the federal government's new $17.5 million alien detention center to Oakdale.
40:34 Speaker 23 The illegal alien problem is a problem. This here is going to get worse. Something has to be done about it.
40:40 Speaker 03 And also, right, if we can pitch that these are immigrants, these are not, you know, people who are accused of murder, right? These aren't, these aren't your typical criminals with big air quotes, right? Then people are going to say, great, you know, this is actually a better alternative to hosting a state prison or a federal prison.
40:58 Speaker 02 Wow, yeah, because it doesn't have the sense of ugliness. Like, you don't think there's murderers or rapists in these facilities? There's just people trying to get into the country. They'll be here temporarily. They'll be sent away. Why not?
41:10 Rund Abdelfatah? But shortly after the Oakdale Detention Center opened in April of 1986, it would receive a group of Cuban immigrants who were deemed "excludable" from residing in the US. These were Cubans who did commit crimes either before or after they arrived, and some who had mental health problems. The US couldn't deport them because Fidel Castro refused to take them back. And the US didn't want them to stay either. So they sat in Oakdale in a kind of limbo.
41:40 Speaker 03 If you are looking for kind of a powder keg of a situation, it is kind of hard to imagine people who feel more desperate than people for whom there is absolutely no clear plan. There is no path either to going back to where you're from or no clear path for being released into the United States.
42:01 Speaker 19 Cuban authorities and the US Immigration Service reached an agreement that calls for the return to Cuba of 2,500 Cubans in US custody.
42:10 Speaker 03 And then finally, in November 1987, they say, incredible news, right? We've got a deal. Castro has agreed to take a large number of these migrants back to Cuba. This news is going to filter in to this group of people who has been detained in these prisons for years. Many of these people feared retribution if they were sent back to Cuba. They imagine they would be seen as defectors from the regime. They imagine that they would spend life in perhaps, you know, even more gruesome prisons if they were sent back. So when they hear the news, right, that this agreement is happening, that their sort of, you know, deportation is potentially imminent, people are explosively angry.
42:52 Speaker 03 They fashion some homemade machetes and swords. First, at Oakdale.
42:57 Speaker 24 And took 28 hostages, many of them guards at the facility.
43:01 Speaker 03 Then, a couple of days later, at Atlanta.
43:04 Speaker 17 We're still talking with the inmates. Just yesterday, negotiators were confident they'd reached an agreement. There was a handshake. All that was missing were Cuban signatures on a dotted line. Today, those signatures are still missing.
43:17 Speaker 03 And they say, "We are not letting these people go until you promise us you will not send us back."
43:22 Speaker 17 Federal authorities plan to wait out the Cubans.
43:25 Speaker 18 An army of officers outside the fence has agreed not to storm the compound.
43:29 Speaker 03 It's this incredible sort of political action, and it is an incredible media spectacle.
43:34 Speaker 17 This community of Oakdale is being worn down by the crisis.
43:38 Speaker 18 This was supposed to be such a good thing for the local economy. Supposed to be.
43:45 Speaker 03 These ended up being the longest hostage standoffs in American history. The Atlanta one is 11 days long, which is really remarkable because there's kind of so little memory of it.
43:53 Rund Abdelfatah? The hostages were freed after the Cubans were promised that the US government would review everyone's cases.
43:59 Speaker 03 But in the meantime, right, they no longer want to hold people in two facilities, right? They now have this idea that this was kind of a recipe for disaster, that if you hold too many people together, it is giving people ammunition for organizing. So they say, "We're going to turn away from these two federal prisons, and we're going to look back to our old pals, our old allies, the county sheriffs." So they start calling county sheriffs throughout the country, but particularly in Louisiana. And they say, "A very similar deal to what sheriffs were pitched 100 years ago."
44:33 Speaker 02 So it was seen as a way out of this situation with these revolts, basically, to go back to the old model.
44:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, it is something that the immigration service kind of continually goes back and forth with over its history. Like, there's a tension between, do we want to have a few centralized sites of immigration detention? Or do we want to sort of scatter people among as many sites as possible? Right? And that maybe that decentralization, that lack of visibility, maybe that gives the immigration service more power, not only in kind of deterring or organizing, but also like, it's harder for the American public to get really angry about conditions at a detention center if people are at 300 detention centers versus two.
45:17 Rund Abdelfatah? And one of the sheriffs that gets a call from the US government is Sheriff Bill Belt.
45:23 Speaker 03 He's in a community called Evoids Parish, which is sort of perfectly in the heart of Louisiana. And Louisiana, as we saw in Oakdale, right, had massive financial challenges in the 1980s. They had some of the highest unemployment in the country. The price of petroleum is absolutely plummeting, which has all these ramifications. So these are communities that are very, very desperate for sort of any economic lifeline.
45:52 Speaker 03 So they call Bill Belt and they say, you know, are you willing to hold these people in your jail? And he says, yes, absolutely.
45:58 Speaker 02 Does it work out for them? Like, does this actually create a sustained economic boost?
46:04 Speaker 03 So he builds, over the course of his time in office, 1,300 detention beds in a community of just over 40,000 people. The sheriff's office, in eight years, it is employing 400 people.
46:22 Speaker 03 And by the end of the 1990s, there are five detention facilities operating in Evoids Parish, which is just absolutely staggering. They don't stay open forever, but many of them stay open for years.
46:38 Speaker 03 And people throughout the country start to pay attention. Folks are seeing what Bell is doing in his parish and they are saying, huh, it doesn't seem like demand for immigration detention space is going away. Like, maybe this is the industry of the future.
46:56 Speaker 02 After the Oakdale and Atlanta prison riots, dozens of local jails and correctional centers contracted with the federal government to detain Cuban immigrants. A Voyles Parish would detain the most. It wasn't just Cubans who were being detained in the 1980s. Crime rates were spiking. There was a crack epidemic. Mass incarceration in general was on the rise. And Congress passed tougher immigration and crime laws. And soon, private prisons started getting contracts with the federal government for detaining immigrants.
47:30 Speaker 03 So, private prison companies are going to say, the jails are great. The jails are all good and fine, but we can build you new, special, immigrant-only facilities faster and cheaper. Why don't you also consider working with us?
47:43 Speaker 02 One of the major private prison providers in the US at the time, known as Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, got its first federal contract ever for detaining immigrants.
47:54 Speaker 03 I think there's like one version of the story where you go, okay, so we don't need sheriffs anymore, right? We just bring in all of these, like, you know, guys in suits who can run it for a fraction of the price. But that doesn't happen. Like, even as private prison companies are going to take on greater and greater shares of the market, the immigration service never seriously loses its dependence on jails. And I think that's for a few reasons, right? I think one is geographic, that idea that like, a jail gives you a footprint everywhere in the country. But the other thing we see is that these private prison companies are just wrecked with problems, particularly in the 90s. There's massive scandals.
48:33 Speaker 02 There were stories about escapes, about abusive guards and poor healthcare. In one infamous case at a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, detainees alleged they were tortured and beaten by guards, lacked fresh air and sunlight, and lived with vermin.
48:52 Speaker 03 Many of these companies think they are not even going to be able to kind of stay afloat financially. Their financial forecast looks so bad because there's high-profile breakouts and there's uprisings. And people from both political parties start to say, maybe this actually isn't something we should have privatized.
49:10 Speaker 03 So when these scandals happen, when these uprisings happen, the immigration service uses this basically strategy they've used for 100 years, which is that they say, we're going to take people out of the site where there's a problem and we're going to scatter them among these jails. So we're going to kind of take the focus or the heat off of this one site. And we are going to decentralize, we are going to obscure people, we are going to hide people in this sort of network of sites that we have, rather than letting this one contentious site be the focus.
49:42 Speaker 02 Brianna says that immigration officials often explain these decisions as a response to overcrowding. But that's not how many of the people who are detained see it. And there's a ton of poor rural communities around the country.
49:55 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
49:56 Speaker 02 That are in desperate positions that might be open to this.
49:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure. And this is something that is so clear in Louisiana today, right? Like, many communities in Louisiana have said, you know, we could not afford to keep our jails open in these communities if we were not getting these deals with ICE. This is not like a footnote to the story of mass incarceration, right? It is a pillar of mass incarceration.
50:19 Speaker 02 Okay, if federal government's spending all this money to detain and then deport people, and a lot of times they're coming back in the country and it's not actually achieving anything economically in terms of supporting American workers, and it's actually hurting American companies, why? Like, why are they doing this if there's no material benefit?
50:41 Speaker 02 To the economy or to protecting workers?
50:46 Speaker 03 To me, it is a core question of sort of who is an American. Immigration detention's roots are in this moment that is so blatantly racist that sort of, you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act pulls no punches about what it is doing. It is targeted to a specific group of people. But that is where we get the legal precedents that undergird this entire system today. It is a system that has only really ever, to my opinion, receded. Immigration detention has only really ever rolled back when it is seen as threatening whiteness. And it is a system that has, you know, continually expanded and gained public support by, you know, targeting racialized people, by targeting people who Americans are encouraged to imagine
51:31 Speaker 03 as maybe kind of criminal anyway, right? It is doing political work and it is doing work that I think is like really revealing about how the nation sees itself.
51:41 Speaker 02 I guess I have trouble fully understanding that. I hear you about the origins of this process being built in racism with the Chinese Exclusion Act, but like President Obama also expanded, you know, immigration, detention, et cetera, during his period. And, you know, I don't think President Obama's policies in general were racist or that it was a racist approach, but I do think he saw a huge political advantage to pursuing this because every president, every politician wants to be appearing to protect the rights of the in-group. It seems to me this all comes back to power and that it seems really easy. This is such an easy power.
52:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I think the question is right. It's like, it's like, who do you blame for problems? And that is the question that the federal government has been trying to answer and it has continually come to the answer that the group to blame for problems. And that problem can look different, right? The problem can be health, it can be crime, it can be poverty, independence. But immigrants, they are outsiders almost by design, right? That is, that is what defines them. They came from somewhere else. And so that has proven to be a very flexible category on which to kind of project whatever social crisis you want.
52:58 Speaker 03 Immigration detention is a deeply bipartisan project. Like, this is absolutely not a history about sort of Republicans expanding it and Democrats trying to roll it back. This is a story about both parties coming to a consensus, right? That migration is criminal and that it like should be punished or administered through the same infrastructure and systems that we use to punish, you know, people who we have moved through the criminal legal system.
53:38 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
53:41 Speaker 02 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. You've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
53:45 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
53:47 Speaker 02 And me, and? Lawrence Wu.
53:50 Speaker 03 Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Kristina Kim.
53:55 Speaker 11 Devin Kadyama.
53:55 Speaker 03 Sarah Wyman. Irene Noguchi.
53:58 Speaker 02 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
54:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks to Jonathan Bastian for their voiceover work.
54:04 Speaker 02 Thank you to Johannes Sturgie, Laura Schwartz, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely.
54:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes.
54:18 Speaker 00 Anya Mizani.
54:20 Speaker 25 Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.
54:23 Speaker 02 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] . And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.
54:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for listening.
54:47 Speaker 17 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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