Nathan Cohen, the Man without a Country

Nathan Cohen, a Russian-Brazilian Jew, was declared insane and deported from the United States in 1914. After being twice refused landing in Brazil and Argentina, Cohen remained trapped on a ship in New York’s harbor with no country willing to accept him. Cohen’s well-publicized story reflected Americans’ fear of immigrants and immigrants’ difficulty navigating increasingly restrictive immigration policies. This episode also reveals how psychiatric evaluations were used at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify, detain, and deport supposedly “unfit” and “mentally defective” immigrants. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mental hospital was by far the carceral institution most likely to hold both immigrants and citizens, and the rate of mental hospital incarceration then is equivalent to the rate in the more recent era of mass incarceration in jails and prisons.

“A Particularly Serious Crime”

Machado was just five years old in 1990 when she was brought to the United States by her mother, who was desperate to escape the civil war raging in their home country of El Salvador; she wanted a better life for her two young daughters. In 2015, she was picked up in a traffic stop in Arkansas which triggered her deportation based on a felony conviction from a decade earlier. Machado’s story reveals a radical shift that had been happening since the mid-1990s. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants were being caught in a system that penalized people with mandatory deportations for relatively low-level crimes. Machado does not fit easily into the Manichean distinction made by President Obama in 2014 between “felons” on the one hand and “families” on the other. Machado, like so many others, is both.

“We Have No End”

In the spring and summer of 1980, 125,000 Cubans fled from the port of Mariel outside of Havana to Florida. By 1987, close to 2,400 Mariel Cubans were being held in prisons in Oakdale, Louisiana, and Atlanta, Georgia, because they had committed crimes in the United States and been ordered deported. Lacking the ability to carry out the deportation, the US government incarcerated the Cubans indefinitely. Upon learning in November 1987 that the Cuban government would accept some of these deportees, detainees in these two prisons rose up, seized 138 hostages, and set the prisons ablaze. After two weeks, the Cuban detainees surrendered once the US government agreed to individually review their asylum claims. The story of the longest prison uprising in US history reveals how law and order politics, emphasizing a heavy-handed policing of crime, merged with immigration restrictions in the 1980s to produce mass immigrant incarceration.

Conclusion

Although the Supreme Court limited detention for non-citizens in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Zadvydas [2000] and Martinez [2005]), its most recent decisions indicate that under certain circumstances non-citizens can be held indefinitely behind bars with no possibility of even a bond hearing. In practice, non-citizens deemed excludable from the United States are like the forever prisoners of Guantanamo, exposed to massive state power with few constitutional protections. Khalid Qassim is one of the forty Guantanamo detainees held for more than eighteen years to date with no charges and no trial. Although Guantanamo prisoners are not voluntary immigrants, they share with immigrants a lack of protection by the US Constitution and a vulnerability to indefinite detention. Immigrant detention today is part of a carceral landscape in the United States that includes more than 2 million citizens behind bars.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the broad sweep of immigrant incarceration from the late nineteenth century through the present. Although the number of immigrants in detention today based on immigration charges is higher than ever, if we consider all forms of incarceration, including mental asylums and people being imprisoned for drug and alcohol charges, the rates of institutionalization in the mid-twentieth century rival that of the last two decades. Furthermore, even though the Immigration and Naturalization Service policy shifted in the early to mid-1950s to paroling immigrants while they applied for asylum rather than detaining them, this was also the moment when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were being detained for short periods of time and returned to Mexico. In the late 1980s and 1990s, criminal and immigration laws merged to mandate deportation for immigrants who had committed even minor offenses decades earlier.

Dawn of Immigrant Incarceration

In the mid-1880s, scores of Chinese migrants were sentenced to six months hard labor at McNeil Island prison off the coast of Washington. After serving their sentences, these Chinese remained in prison when Canada refused to accept them back. The indefinite detention of the Chinese was the first time the government was faced with the contradiction between the still emerging immigration law and the demands of justice. This episode also reveals that the standard narrative that immigration was not criminalized until 1929 is wrong. Further investigation into this prison’s population from 1880 to 1940 uncovered a world of immigrant incarceration, largely based on drug and alcohol offenses. The early history of McNeil Island prison is evidence that the criminalization of immigrants and migration began long before our present era of mass immigrant detention.

Japanese Peruvian Enemy Aliens during World War II

Seiichi Higashide was not an agent of the Japanese emperor or a pro-Axis immigrant, and yet he and more than 1,800 other Japanese Peruvians got caught up in a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria during World War II that led to their kidnapping, forced migration, and incarceration in hastily erected camps in Texas and New Mexico. Higashide and his family were detained as “illegal aliens” in an Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility in Texas alongside thousands of other foreigners in other camps spread across the Southwest. After the war, Higashide and his family worked at Seabrook Farms, a food processing complex in New Jersey, which was essentially a prison work camp. In the 1950s, the Higashides became US citizens, but the trauma of detention and racism remains with the family. The Higashides’ story reveals the intersection between US empire, national security, and immigrant detention.