Throughline - The Business of Migrant Detention

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

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 IncarcerationTo access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Love podcasts? For handpicked recommendations every Friday, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. 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. And 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 superintentional 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. States. So for many Chinese migrants who are still looking for a path in, this is one of their best options. Wow, interesting. 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. That takes us back to the reporter, Pulteney 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 we're about 30 Chinamen awaiting trial. They basically stashed people in the attic of this jail, which was never intended to hold people at all. In 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. We 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 Chinaman as one gigantic and complicated fraud. These people are accused of anything, but they are sitting in our jails for months on end.

This is Brianna Nofil. I'm an assistant professor of history at William and Mary, and my book is called The Migrants' Jail in 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, and it kind of spiraled out from there. And what she found was that for as long as the federal government has restricted immigration, it's 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 roots 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.

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. A new ice facility being called the Cornhusband.

Mr. 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. I'm Ramtin Arablui. And I'm Randabud Fetatah.

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. Support for NPR, and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege,

but a right. Learn more at our WJF.org Part 1. 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. And the local sheriff was happy to have them.

The sheriff is a guy named Ernest Douglas. He's a pretty standard, ordinary rural sheriff. 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 of 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. 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.

$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. 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. But not only was Sheriff Douglas making money for every person he held in jail,

Poltony Bigelow reported that it was easy money. And he says, when I talk 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. 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.

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 there 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. 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? They're 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 court.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. And 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. 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 slow down along the northern New York border, some counties which had relied on money from the federal government may please to bring back Chinese detainees. St. 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 is it foreshadow about the future of migrant detention in the United States? 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. 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. Support for NPR and the following message come from the estate of Joan B. Croc, whose bequest serves as an enduring investment in the future of public radio and seeks to help NPR be the model for high-quality journalism.

in the 21st century. Part 2. The Prison Business. In August of 1948, a woman named Ellen Knoff 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. The Department of Justice, This 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 Migrants 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. communist, fascists, or people like Ellen Knoff. Knoff was German-porn, 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 Knaf 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 Knoff, 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. Noff's case would eventually make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the U.S. 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. 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 the ferry birthed at the Manhattan Pier, the New York Times. Knoff'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 the state. 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 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. And he says, the imprisonment of aliens awaiting admission or deportation has been stopped. Instead, immigrants coming to the U.S. 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 U.S. was worried about the influx of immigrants afterwards. 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, 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 needs. negative publicity. 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 were 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, you know, as there often is, right, a really big caveat. 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. 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. history, 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. invites tens of thousands of Mexican labors 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. So then how did the Eisenhower administration claim that the United States government is ending detention? So the Immigration Service is quite intentional. 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. 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. The Justice Department and its Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS,

had 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 Fed. 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.

Some 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 grand 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 Mexical Catraz or Sultry Siberia. 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. 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 the federal government 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? It's a great question, right?

So 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 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 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 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. I'm like, 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. 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. 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 McCallon, 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 Webback. How does this represent a turning point

in migrant detention in U.S. history? 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 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 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. What I take away to 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. I think it is, right? And I think the other thing that we start to see that's going to become I'm 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.

But what's fascinating about this, though, is that in frankly, in frankly, County, many of the Chinese immigrants kind of just saw it as the right 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? 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.

Their U.S. is just deporting more people. It is more successful in removing people. 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 U.S. And in just a couple of decades, a legal entry to the U.S. was about to live. blow up. I think there's sort of a thread here that is like any of these things that the U.S.

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. Coming up, the golden handcuffs of migrant attention. Hi, this is Reza calling from Tehran, Iran. It's a blessing to listen to a proof-read podcast at these turbulent times.

This is through line from the NPR. Thank you. Part 3. A Pillar of Mass Incarceration. A standoff continues tonight in Oakdale, Louisiana, where hundreds of Cubans held at a federal detention center are holding at least 20 guards hostage. The inmates have been communicating some of their demands on hand-painted sign. Officials don't know exactly how many hostages there are or even who they are. No list has been compiled. There has been no change in negotiations.

Talks are not yet scheduled to resume. 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. Most of these Cubans came to this country seven years ago in the Mariel Boat Lift. The U.S. had welcomed refugees coming over on the Mariel Boat Lift 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 U.S.

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 U.S., who are convicted of a crime. So in theory, the U.S. wants to deport these people back to Cuba. but Castro sort of hardline refuses to take them. This is Brianna-Nofil, author of The Migrant's Jail, an American history of mass incarceration. So what that means is that the U.S. 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, really thorny question of, can the U.S. hold people indefinitely? The U.S. 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. This week, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service opened a new detention center in rural Oakdale, Louisiana. About 200 miles from New Orleans. The Oakdale mayor launches this all-out effort to get this site for his community. After the furniture factories left, the paper bag plant went out of business and the lumber mill closed. This town was dying.

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. Helping to lower unemployment, which had been the highest in the country. 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. That made Mayor George Moad fight hard to bring the federal

government's new $17.5 million alien detention center to Oakdale. The illegal alien problem is a problem that's here. It's going to get worse. Something has to be done about it. 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. 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? 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 U.S. These were Cubans who did commit crimes, either before or after they arrived, and some who had mental health problems. The U.S. couldn't deport them because Fidel Castro refused to take them back, and the U.S. didn't want them to stay either.

So they sat in Oakdale in a kind of limbo. 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. 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. Cuban authorities and the U.S. Immigration Service reached an agreement that calls for the return to Cuba of 2,500 Cubans in U.S. custody. 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 imagined that they would spend life in perhaps 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 deportation is potentially imminent. people are explosively angry. They fashioned some homemade machetes and swords. First at Oakdale.

And took 28 hostages. Many of them guards at the facility. Then a couple of days later, at Atlanta. We're still talking with the inmate. 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.

And they say, we are not letting these people go, until you promise us you will not send us back. Federal authorities plan to wait out the Cuban. Army of officers outside the fence has agreed not to storm the compound. It's this incredible sort of political action, and it is an incredible media spectacle. This community of Oakdale is being worn down by the crisis. This was supposed to be such a good thing for the local economy.

Both of me. 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. The hostages were freed after the Cubans were promised that the U.S. government would review everyone's cases. 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 a hundred years ago. So it was seen as a way out of this situation with these revolts, basically, to go back to the old model. 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 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. And one of the sheriffs that gets a call from the U.S. government is Sheriff Bill Belt. He's in a community called DeVoyles 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, very dark.

desperate for sort of any economic lifeline. 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. Does it work out for them? Like, does this actually create a sustained economic boost? 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 within eight years, it is employing 400 people. And by the end of the 1990s, there are five detention facilities operating in Evoils Parish,

which is just absolutely staggering. They don't stay open forever, but many of them stay open for years. 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. After the Oakdale and Atlanta prison riots, dozens of local jails and correctional centers contracted with the federal government to detain Cuban immigrants. A Boyle's parish would detain them most. It wasn't just Cubans who were being detained in the 19th.

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. 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. One of the major private prison providers in the U.S. at the time, known as Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, got its first federal contract ever for detaining immigrants.

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. There were stories about escapes, about abuse of guards and poor health care. 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. 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. 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, you know, 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. 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. Absolutely. That are in desperate positions that might be open to this.

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. Okay.

If federal government 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 is actually hurting American companies, why? Like, why are they doing this if there's no material benefit to the economy or to protecting workers? 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 the syndicions. entire system today. It is a system that has only really ever, to my opinion, receded immigration detention, is 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 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. I guess I have trouble, like, fully understanding that. I hear you about the origins of this process being built in racism with the Chinese Exclusionary 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 end group. It seems to me, this all comes back to power and that it seems really easy. It's such an easy power. I think the question is right. 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 and dependence. But immigrants, they are outsiders almost by design, right? 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. Immigration detention is a deeply bipartisan project. This is absolutely not a story 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. That's it for this week's show. I'm Rand Dabed Fetach. And I'm Ramtin Adablui. You've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Lawrence Wu.

Julie K. Ania Steinberg. K. K. K. K. K. Gistina Kim, Devin Katayama, Sarah Wyman, Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thanks to Jonathan Bastion for their voiceover work. Thank you to Johannes Durgy, Laura Schwartz, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keeley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Navid Marvi, Shoe Fujiwara.

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org.