Forever Prisoners
How the United States Made the World’s
Largest Immigrant Detention System
Elliott Young
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Young, Elliott, 1967– author.
Title: Forever prisoners : how the United States made the world’s largest immigrant detention system / Elliott Young.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018277 (print) | LCCN 2020018278 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190085957 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190085971 (epub) | ISBN 9780190085988
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Immigrants—Governemnt policy—United States. | Alien detention centers—United States—History. | Detention of persons—United States. | Human rights—United States.
Classification: LCC JV6483 .Y68 2021 (print) | LCC JV6483 (ebook) | DDC 365/.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018277
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018278
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For
Reiko, Zulema, and Ryo
And all the migrants who strive to be free
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. Dawn of Immigrant Incarceration: Chinese and Other Aliens at McNeil Island Prison 23
2. Nathan Cohen, the Man without a Country 54
3. Japanese Peruvian Enemy Aliens during World War II 86
4. “We Have No End”: Mariel Cuban Prisoners Rise Up 119
5. “A Particularly Serious Crime”: Mayra Machado in an Age of Crimmigration 158
Conclusion: A Nation of Immigrant Prisons 185
Notes 197
Bibliography 231 Index 249
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book emerged in a moment of political crisis when detention and deportations have reached unprecedented levels in the United States. I had been studying transnational migration for years, but I became more aware of the problem of mass incarceration and policing through conversations with my partner, Reiko Hillyer, and a friend, David Menschel. I began to see how policing and immigrant detention were inextricably linked. What began as a book about immigrant detention became a project about mass incarceration.
Following the election of President Trump, a group of immigration historians consulted with each other over email about how to confront what was likely to be an all-out assault on immigrants. Sanctuary campuses was one idea that we advocated given our location in universities. In the coming months, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began an intense effort to round up undocumented immigrants inside courthouses, and outside of hospitals and schools. Immigrant advocates responded by passing ordinances to disentangle local law enforcement with immigration enforcement in what became a widespread sanctuary movement across cities and universities. We knew what was happening around us, but the genealogy of the immigrant detention system remained shrouded in mystery. Furthermore, the activist calls to abolish ICE ignored this much longer history of detention and deportation. Hopefully, this book can serve advocates as a reminder of the many ways immigrant incarceration has happened in the past so we do not simply replace one form of prison for another.
Since 2014 when I began researching and writing this book, I have written more than 250 expert witness declarations for asylum cases in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Venezuela. It is that work that put me in touch with Mayra Machado. My testimony has also helped many of these families to gain asylum and reminded me that my academic knowledge can be useful in the real world. I thank Stephen Manning of the
x Innovation Law Lab for getting me involved in such work. My hat goes off to the many immigration attorneys across the country and in the United Kingdom with whom I have collaborated on asylum cases. They are doing amazing work under the most difficult conditions.
Intellectually, I have been sustained by the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, an institute I co- founded with Pamela Voekel in 2004, which brings together scholars from across the Americas in a small town outside of Mexico City each summer. I have learned and drawn inspiration from the amazing array of scholars, artists, and activists who have participated. The collective that runs the institute has become my alt- family. I want to particularly thank collectivistas Josie Saldaña, David Kazanjian, Alejandra Puerto, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Micol Seigel, David Sartorius, Jorge Giovannetti, Anna Moore, and Shane Dillingham for their comradeship and ideas. I want to also thank my colleagues in the History department at Lewis & Clark College who have read various chapters of this book in our colloquium, and especially Mo Healy and Andy Bernstein for their comments in an intensive summer workshop. Law scholars and professors Stephen Manning, Juliet Stumpf, and Aliza Kaplan were my legal dream team who helped me get the legal details right for the final chapter. Over the years I have also been lucky to have amazing Lewis & Clark College student research assistants who helped me do archival research in Washington, DC; Mexico City; Seattle; San Francisco; and New York City: Kate Wackett, Megan Scott-Busenbark, Alexander Castanes, Lauren Krumholz, Maya Litauer Chan, Will Sarvis, Maggie Costello, and Sofia Knutson.
This kind of project could not have happened without the scholarship and mentorship from many scholars of migration (too many to name), including the following: Ana Raquel Minian, Madeline Hsu, Mae Ngai, Erika Lee, Maria Cristina Garcia, Maddalena Marrinari, Hidetaka Hirota, Torrie Hester, Naomi Paik, Adam Goodman, and Alexander Stephens. Mad props to Kelly Lytle-Hernández who invited me to participate in a special issue on the Carceral West, resulting in the article, “Caging Immigrants at McNeil Island Federal Prison, 1880–1940,” Pacific Historical Review (2019) 88 (1): 48–85, which eventually formed the basis for the first chapter in the book. Through her activism in Los Angeles, her rigorous scholarship, and her keen editorial eye, Kelly is a model for scholar-activists.
History does not get written without the archivists, so thank you to those at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and Seattle, the Washington State archives, the Atlanta History Center, and the Canadian Archives who made this book possible. Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who gave me detailed and intense feedback that pushed me to hone my argument.
And to Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press, who understood what I was trying to do with this book and helped me to make it the best version that it could be.
I especially want to recognize the people shared their personal and traumatic stories with me. Elsa Kudo, Seeichi and Angelica Higashide’s daughter, who was herself locked up in a detention camp in Texas as a child, told me about her and her family’s experiences. Tami Kudo Harnish, Elsa’s daughter, also generously commented on the chapter about her family. Gary Leshaw, who provided legal defense for Mariel Cubans at Atlanta Penitentiary, and Sally Sandige, who coordinated the Coalition to Support Cuban Detainees, both granted me interviews and allowed me access to dozens of boxes of documents that provided me with a unique understanding of the detainees’ own views on their incarceration. Finally, Mayra Machado has been a constant source of inspiration for me. Seeing how she organized her own legal defense, coordinated solidarity from around the country, and supported her children, all from inside an ICE detention center in rural Louisiana, was a lesson in persistence. She has lost all of her legal battles thus far, but she refuses to give up. Big shout out to Isabel Medina and Benjamin Osorio, attorneys, who both took on Mayra’s case pro bono and who continue to pursue justice for her.
What often gets forgotten is that research is an embodied enterprise, and one needs food and lodging while digging through dusty boxes in the archive. In Atlanta, Johnny Hillyer provided shelter, food, and a makeshift photography studio, and J. T. Way stayed up with me until the wee hours one Saturday night in a clandestine scanning operation at Georgia State. In Washington, DC, David Sartorius runs the best secret residency program out of his apartment (take note Mellon Foundation) and gave my students and me a place to crash.
Finally, Reiko Hillyer continues to be my best interlocutor and editor for this book, and so many other life projects. Ryo Havana, our daughter, has watched me for the first four years of her life pound away at the keyboard working on this book. She recently asked me if my story would have lots of pictures. When I said it would have only a few, she predicted it would be a boring book. Let’s hope other readers are more generous.
ABBREVIATIONS
AEDEPA Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
BOP Bureau of Prisons
DACA Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
DHS Department of Homeland Security
HIAS Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement
IIRIRA Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996)
INS Immigration and Naturalization Service
NDLON National Day Laborer Organizing Network
Forever Prisoners
Introduction
I’m not a bad person. I shouldn’t be here. . . . I’m not a threat to society and I’m not going to hurt anybody. I should be taking care of my children.
Mayra Machado, from a Louisiana immigrant detention center, 2016
Migration stories are inherently about mobility, people plowing across oceans and rivers, boarding trains and buses on dangerous journeys, and trekking across deserts in the dark of night. But those hopeful stories of flight to freedom, escaping from poverty, violence, and political persecution at home, have ended for millions with imprisonment behind bars in the United States. The caged butterfly is an apt metaphor for migrants caught in the steel jaws of a detention system that now locks up half a million people each year. This book is about these butterflies and the cages we have built for more than a century to keep their wings clipped.
In December 2015, Mayra Machado took her three kids to shop for Christmas decorations in a mall in Springdale, a suburb of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Ever since her miscarriage a few months earlier, her family was depressed, so she hoped Christmas decorations would bring some cheer to their lives. Dominic (10), Dayanara (8), and Dorian (6) were excited about the upcoming holidays. On the car ride home, Dominic realized he had left his eyeglasses at the Hobby Lobby they had visited, and so Mayra turned her car around and returned to the store. Raising three kids was difficult after the father of her children had abandoned the family. But she had a good job as an ophthalmologist’s assistant and had a new fiancé. Her hopeful future came crashing down when a police officer pulled Machado over for failing to yield, an offense she claims never happened. He discovered that
Machado had an unpaid traffic fine for another failure to yield charge. Although she offered to pay the ticket immediately with a credit card, the officer arrested her and had her car towed away. In 2019, Machado told me her story from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Louisiana.1
On the side of the road, Machado’s three children witnessed their mother being handcuffed and arrested, an image that still haunts them to this day. This was not the first time they had heard of family members being snatched by police. At the station, Machado knew many of the police officers because they had visited the ophthalmologist where she worked. She figured she would pay the fine and be home by evening. However, an old, bald officer said, “Bring her over here,” and he demanded to know where she was born and her immigration status. The officer flashed a 287(g) badge that authorized him as an ICE agent. After checking the immigration status of her mother, sister, and grandmother, the officer said he was issuing an immigration hold based on her undocumented status and felony convictions for a writing a hot check a decade earlier. Machado was born in El Salvador and brought by her mother to this country when she was five years old. Her three children were born in the United States. At that point Machado was told she was being taken to Fort Smith detention center in Arkansas where she would be issued a bond and released. Instead, Machado was shackled and sent to an ICE detention center in rural Louisiana where she was ordered deported to a country she left as a child and where she knew nobody.2 For the relatively minor crime of writing a bad check when she was a teenager, Machado was punished with banishment and separation from her children. Even for a criminal justice system rife with extreme sentences, this was an absurdly disproportionate outcome. And yet, for immigrants such extremities are the norm.
This book begins with Machado’s story because it illustrates how toughon- crime laws intersected with harsh immigration policies in the last three decades to make millions of immigrants vulnerable to deportation based on criminal acts, even minor ones, that had been committed years or decades earlier. Machado’s history also shows how much had changed between 2004, when she was first arrested on felony charges for writing the fraudulent checks, and 2015, when her immigration status became the central issue in what was a routine traffic stop. The integration of local police with immigration enforcement in the 2010s cast a much wider net, entrapping millions of long- term immigrant residents in the jaws of an enhanced deportation machine. By the end of Obama’s second term, he had earned the dubious distinction of deporting over three million people, more immigrants than any other president in history. In doing so, the
twenty- first century became an era of mass immigrant detention and deportation. There are millions of other immigrants like Mayra Machado who have their own stories of living in the United States, some with US citizen children, some having committed crimes, but all sharing the experience of being locked up and deported. Machado’s story should be familiar to us from recent media accounts, but the long history of how we got from there to here is less understood. Building on the exciting new scholarship in recent years, this book provides an explanation of how, where, and why noncitizens were put behind bars in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through select granular experiences of detention over the course of more than 140 years, I explain how America built the world’s largest system for imprisoning immigrants.
HISTORY OF IMMIGRANT DETENTION
From the late nineteenth century, when the US government held hundreds of Chinese in federal prisons pending deportation, to the early twentieth century, when it caged hundreds of thousands of immigrants in insane asylums, to World War I and World War II, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declared tens of thousands of foreigners “enemy aliens” and locked them up in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) camps in Texas and New Mexico, and through the 1980s detention of over 125,000 Cuban and almost 23,000 Haitian refugees, the incarceration of foreigners nationally has ebbed and flowed.3 Although far more immigrants are being held in prison today than at any other time in US history, earlier moments of immigrant incarceration echo present-day patterns. In fact, the legal debates about incarcerating immigrants indefinitely pending deportation stretches all the way back to the late 1880s, and the rates of institutionalization (all forms of incarceration) in the early to mid- twentieth century rival those of the twenty- first century.
Until very recently, the study of incarcerated immigrants has fallen in the crack between prison and migration studies. Migration scholars focus on movement of people across borders and the communities they establish in their adopted countries. Prison scholarship has mostly ignored the question of migrant incarceration, focusing instead on the mass imprisonment of largely Black and Brown citizens.4 Although the issue of migrant incarceration is touched upon in both fields, there is little sustained effort to describe, measure, or account for their imprisonment, especially before the 1980s. Recent books focusing on the rise of immigrant and refugee detention since the 1970s help to flesh out the latest period of mass immigrant
incarceration and particularly the link between immigration and criminal law. These scholars show how legislation and specific policies from the 1980s to the present have resulted in the massive growth of migrant detention.5 The historical studies of Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in San Francisco help us to understand where and how immigrants were detained in the first half of the twentieth century. The government incarcerated 300,000 migrants on Angel Island from 1910 to 1940, more than half of whom were Chinese (100,000) and Japanese (85,000), making it by far the largest detention center at the time. Ellis Island processed many more than Angel Island (around 12 million) but fewer people were held there and they were detained for shorter periods.6 Legal historical studies of deportation also offer a framework for understanding the laws that provided for detention pursuant to deportation, but oftentimes these works pay short shrift to the experience of detention itself.7
Various scholars have argued that when writing about immigration and citizenship, we must not only focus on those coming from outside the country hoping to become part of the national community but must also consider the ways in which insiders have been rendered non- citizens and foreigners.8 Native Americans and enslaved Africans are the most obvious examples of people who were very much inside the nation and yet were rendered “aliens” legally, politically, and socially. Free Blacks had citizenship rights in certain states, but their legal subordination made them into non- citizens in slave states and rendered them vulnerable to efforts to “repatriate” them to Africa. And even though Black people gained formal citizenship in 1868 and Native Americans in 1924, obstacles to voting, Jim Crow, and other discriminatory practices continued to limit their citizenship rights. Native Americans were subject to congressional plenary power in the late nineteenth century even after the 1887 Dawes Act conferred citizenship on individual land-owning Indians, and certain states barred Native Americans from voting up to 1962, suggesting the extent to which citizenship rights were limited for non- white people. Although formally citizens, white US women were also considered to have less than full citizenship rights well into the twentieth century. In 1907, Congress passed a law that stripped US women of their formal citizenship if they married a non- citizen, and women lacked voting rights until 1920. The poor of all races also had limited voting rights and were subject to vagrancy laws and incarceration at extremely high rates. Thus, insiders of many stripes were rendered non- citizens or second- class citizens. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women, non- whites, and the poor have gained formal citizenship rights, although even today these rights are constrained
through legal and extralegal means, but the line between non- citizens and citizens cuts more deeply than ever.
Although this book does not focus on the “insiders” whose citizenship rights have been stripped or limited, its aim is to draw connections between the incarceration of non- citizens and second- class citizens. Many of the same prisons and detention centers for immigrants also held citizens who were poor, Black, and disenfranchised. Japanese Americans were locked up in spite of their being citizens, and many Latinx Americans have been swept up in deportation raids notwithstanding being born in the United States or having become naturalized citizens. Historian Laura Briggs has shown how the same practices of stripping children from their parents that happened on the US-Mexico border have precedents from the colonial era through the present for Native Americans and African Americans; oftentimes the very same carceral sites and facilities have been used for noncitizens and citizens.9 The bright line between citizen and non- citizen is much clearer in the law books than on the street. The eroding of rights of non- citizens and their increasing criminalization since the late nineteenth century has gone hand in hand with the denial of rights to subordinated citizens. It is not a coincidence that the dramatic expansion of immigrant detention and deportation happened at the very same time that mass incarceration of citizens exploded.
The book’s title, Forever Prisoners, takes its name from the term used by journalists and others to refer to the terrorist suspects being held at the US prison at the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some of those picked up in 2001 in the midst of the War on Terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere are still being held in Guantanamo, never having been charged with a crime and with no foreseeable end in sight to their incarceration. After almost twenty years behind bars, they are forever prisoners. From the late nineteenth century, many immigrants also found themselves facing indefinite detention, either having never been charged with a crime or having years earlier completed their criminal sentences. The forever prisoners are a small subset of the millions of all non- citizens locked up domestically or held in US- controlled prisons outside the country, but their stories demonstrate the extent to which foreigners in the United States and in UScontrolled territories have found themselves beyond the protection of the Constitution or any semblance of human rights. What makes immigrants forever prisoners is not just the indeterminate time they spend locked up, but that they often remain vulnerable to detention and other forms of restrictions after release; they are never truly free. Non- citizens live in perpetual fear of incarceration and deportation for minor offenses that
may have occurred decades earlier. And even naturalized citizens are under threat of having their citizenship stripped. Like twenty- first- century slave catchers, ICE agents roam highways, fields, and factories, snatching people from their homes and workplaces, and separating parents from their crying children. If immigrants are deported, they often live circumscribed lives far from their families and hemmed in by violent gangs and corrupt police. Mayra Machado spent almost three years in prison pending deportation proceedings and although she was deported for a second time in January 2020, she still feels like a prisoner in El Salvador, hiding out in a room, cut off from her family, friends, and home. As Machado put it while fighting back tears a few days after being deported, “Nothing has changed.”10
In this book, immigrant, migrant, foreigner, non- citizen, and refugee are used to refer to the people who have been imprisoned. Not all migrants intend to become immigrants who establish long- term residence, and some of the people discussed did not even choose to come to this country but were brought here at gunpoint by the US government. However, all of the people in this book shared a legal status as “aliens.” Although the term “alien” or “illegal alien” will not be used unless referring to the government’s designation, tracking the criminalization of non- citizens and the making of the idea of “illegal aliens” is the point.11 While each of the abovementioned labels carries a precise legal meaning, these labels tend to obscure the common experience shared by all of those who do not enjoy the benefits of full citizenship. That commonality is what I want to highlight.
A concept known as plenary power is the reason immigrants have found themselves so exposed to state power with little protection from the Constitution or the courts. The plenary power doctrine vests the right to devise and enforce immigration laws with the legislative and executive branches, and the Supreme Court has been reticent to review such statutes even based on constitutional constraints.12 There is a long and complicated legal history of indefinite detention of non- citizens, with courts alternating between granting the government unlimited powers to incarcerate non- citizens and imposing time limitations on their detention pending a hearing or deportation. Recently the Supreme Court decided two important cases that upheld the right of the government to hold certain classes of immigrants in detention indefinitely without a bail hearing.13 Although legal scholars argue that the Court left open the possibility of a constitutional challenge to indefinite detention, the current practice allows the government unfettered and unlimited detention authority. To most lay people, the ability of the government to imprison people without end and without a criminal conviction seems unfair and a blatant disregard of the most basic of civil rights, the right to freedom.
This study of immigrant deportation and detention builds on the important work of scholars who have investigated particular periods and forms of detention by examining all the ways foreigners have been imprisoned in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the present. This wider and more comprehensive perspective highlights the waxing and waning of particular forms of incarceration over time as it appreciates the magnitude and scope of carceral institutions that have locked up millions of non- citizens for more than a century. Many recent studies argue that the recent wave of mass immigrant detention is a dramatic departure from the past, pointing to the supposed hiatus of immigrant detention from 1954 through the 1970s.14 A wider and deeper examination of the pre-1980s period, however, challenges that conclusion. Although the last thirty years have been a time of mass incarceration for both citizens and non- citizens, the rates of institutionalization in the early to mid- twentieth century, which include people locked in hospitals for the mentally ill and other charitable institutions, were equal to the rates in the twenty- first century. Broadly speaking, more people were locked up in insane asylums than prisons in the early twentieth century, and by the 1960s, psychiatric institutions began emptying out and prisons began filling up. People suffering from mental illness were likely to be found in insane asylums in the early twentieth century, but in the late twentieth century those people were being incarcerated in jails and prisons. Given this reality, one needs to look beyond jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers to the hospitals for the mentally ill and other institutions where foreigners were denied liberty. Similarly, during World War II, tens of thousands of foreigners ended up behind bars after being accused of being “enemy aliens,” not to mention the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans interned in forced relocation camps. Examining all of these different forms of non- citizen incarceration in one volume reveals for the first time that mass immigrant incarceration was as prevalent in the early twentieth century as it is in the twenty- first century. The justifications have changed and the names emblazoned on the prisons have altered, but roughly the same proportion of immigrants were deprived of their liberty then as now. As we imagine a different future, we must be cognizant of the variety of ways that immigrants have been locked up in the past. The solution to the immigrant incarceration crisis is therefore not to return to a rosy past when foreigners were welcomed, but to create a radically new vision of rights beyond citizenship.
Incarcerating poor and mentally ill immigrants has a long history in America. Before the federal government took over the enforcement of immigration restrictions in the 1880s, states like New York and Massachusetts practiced their own immigrant processing, detention, and deportation.
New York established a station at Castle Garden in lower Manhattan in 1855 where immigrants deemed excludable due to their poverty or criminal past were detained and deported.15 When Ellis Island was created in 1892, the federal government took over enforcement of immigration restrictions, but almost all foreigners transferred through the center in a few hours, and those detained longer were usually held for just a few days. In contrast, at Angel Island, the immigrant processing center established in San Francisco Bay in 1910, Asians, particularly Chinese, were held for much longer periods of time, often for weeks at a time, while their eligibility to enter was determined by immigration officials.16 Although immigrants detained at either Ellis Island or Angel Island were not legally considered prisoners, they experienced their detention as imprisonment. Bennie Woon Yep, who was detained for one month at Angel Island, described sleeping on metal beds and being separated from family members as “just like a jail.”17 One author estimated that 3,500 immigrants died at Ellis Island, including 1,400 children. Although accurate data are unavailable, multiple reports of immigrants in detention committing suicide at both Ellis Island and Angel Island illustrate their desperation when faced with the prospect of deportation or indefinite detention.18 Even as detentions of prospective immigrants on Ellis Island waned, it became a convenient place for the federal government to imprison foreign radicals pending deportation. The anarchist Emma Goldman, longshoreman union leader Harry Bridges, and a host of other radicals were locked up on Ellis Island before it was finally shuttered in 1954.19
Since the late nineteenth century, the infrastructure to incarcerate immigrants has grown in periodic bouts of prison-building frenzies. From the early 1950s to the late 1970s, however, there was a pause in a longstanding policy of detaining immigrants and refugees while their claims for asylum were being adjudicated. Immigration was at a historic low in the early 1950s, and the proportion of the foreign-born American population had been in decline from the early twentieth century, so there was little public pressure to keep immigrants locked up.20 Another reason for the policy of generally paroling refugees and immigrants rather than detaining them was that the United States was projecting itself as a beacon of freedom and hope in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.21 A supposedly “liberal” attitude toward immigrants was part of US foreign policy propaganda, even as the Cold War–inspired 1952 McCarren-Walter Act stepped up deportations and placed severe restrictions on Asian migration. In 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. announced the new policy at a naturalization ceremony on Veterans Day at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn: “In all but a few cases, those aliens whose admissibility or
deportation is under study will no longer be detained. Only those deemed likely to abscond or those whose freedom of movement could be adverse to the national security or the public safety will be detained.” All others, Brownell asserted, would be released on parole. Brownell predicted that the number of those detained in exclusion proceedings outside of the Mexican border would drop from 38,000 in 1953 to fewer than 1,000 under the new policy. The new initiative was so “far reaching in scope and effect,” Brownell declared, that the Justice Department was closing six detention centers at seaports in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, San Pedro, Honolulu, and the paradigmatic one in New York at Ellis Island.22 In 1958, four years after Brownell’s announcement, Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark said, “The physical detention of aliens is now the exception.”23
Like magicians using sleight of hand, Attorney General Brownell and Justice Clark pointed to the closed detention centers at seaports to distract attention from the Border Patrol’s temporary camps for Mexicans in the Southwest. At the very moment Brownell was announcing the end of immigrant detention, “Operation Wetback” had reached a record number of over one million Mexicans returned to Mexico. These operations involved short- term detentions and were not formal removals involving a legal process, but they required a massive detention structure nonetheless. The intense focus on apprehending and deporting Mexicans began well before 1954, with Mexicans accounting for over 90 percent of the hundreds of thousands of national apprehensions (1943–54) each year. Migrants were processed quickly in temporary detention centers, some in converted tomato warehouses, and then either transported to the border by bus or train, or flown to the interior on airplanes.24 Thus, even in this period when immigrant detention was supposedly the exception rather than the rule, there were still hundreds of thousands of immigrants being rounded up, detained, and deported. The duration of detention was shortened, the locale had shifted from seaports to the southern border, and the detainees were Mexicans rather than Europeans, but the detention regime did not end.
The closing of Ellis Island in 1954 led to other problems when detained immigrants were transferred into New York City jails. A few days after Brownell’s announcement of the new policy, author Pearl Buck complained in a letter to the New York Times that due to the closing of Ellis Island, immigrants were being transferred to jails alongside common criminals. “They are locked up with murderers, drug addicts and other degenerate types,” Buck wrote. “Their food is inadequate, their bed mattresses dirty. They have little opportunity to get fresh air, and they must perform labor such as criminal persons perform.”25 Publicly shamed, the Justice Department rescinded its order to hold immigrants in jails and instead
