That brings us to today, and one of the things that your work is focussed on is the fact that the U.S. government did not always detain immigrants who cross the border illegally. When did that shift, and why did it shift?
Right, so immigration detention has a very long history. It starts in the late nineteenth century. Immigrants were generally put in detention. For example, what happened at Ellis Island. Now, by 1954, there have been changing views of immigrants, there has been a declining rate of immigration, and so the Immigration and Naturalization Service says, There are better ways to handle these people. They don’t necessarily need to be kept in detention while we decide what to do with them. And so they release them, unless they pose a threat to U.S. society, or unless they believe that they can escape, that they’re not going to return when called upon to do so. They let them go out, and now the Supreme Court says that, basically, the qualities of an enlightened civilization mean that we’re no longer detaining people.
But in 1980 Fidel Castro decides to allow all Cubans who want to leave the island to do so, and a hundred and twenty-four thousand people leave Cuba to come to the United States—they leave through the port of Mariel, so this is known as the Mariel boatlift. And once they’re on their way Castro says, You know what? Among those who are heading to the United States, we sent some criminals and homosexuals and people who had been in mental institutions. And, of course, Americans go crazy. They become very, very scared as to what’s going to happen.
When folks from Mariel arrive, many are sent to [military] bases throughout the country, where someone needs to sponsor them, but those who were believed to be criminals are sent to prison in the United States. Additionally, during these years, Haitians start coming in increasing numbers as well. And the United States is also very opposed to Haitians—you know, Haitians are seen as particularly dangerous. One of the ways in which they want to deal with Haitians is to interdict them at sea, to prevent them from even entering the country. But another means to disincline them to come is to put them in detention. So, between the folks who come in Mariel and the Haitians, then detention starts to grow all over again.
How does that then switch to a process where it just became normal to detain people who came from anywhere, including Mexico?
Once detention starts to grow, facilities start to grow, and government officials at different levels, including I.N.S., start to say, We need to build more detention centers. Kind of like now, we’re saying, We need to have more beds. It was the I.N.S. that formalized the process of blanket detention. And in some ways it could be argued that it’s a humane thing, you know, like, Oh, we need to keep them with good beds. But, actually, by increasing the number of detention centers, it leads to more detained people. So that’s what happens and, in fact, it becomes a for-profit industry. The first for-profit prisons in the United States were actually immigration-detention centers.