Bolts has another of their “Ask Bolts” Q&A features up right now, this time on immigration. You can still get in on it:
Donald Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” looms over millions of people who live in the United States. But the infrastructure to detain and incarcerate immigrants didn’t start with Trump.
U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 people per night, often partnering with sheriffs who hold immigrants in their local facilities in exchange for a profit. This practice has a long history that predates ICE and other modern federal immigration agencies: For over a century, the U.S. government has relied on local jails to detain immigrants, creating a vast network of incarceration that operates with minimal oversight. The incoming Trump administration is likely to tap into this network in coming years.
Historian Brianna Nofil traces these developments in her new book, The Migrant’s Jail. From the detention of Chinese migrants in New York in the early 1900s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in the South in the 1980s, her writing explains how federal authorities and local law enforcement have helped each other create a patchwork of policies that incentivizes incarceration.
We suspect you have questions about these issues in the wake of Trump’s victory, so we asked Nofil if she would be willing to answer them—and she agreed.
By the way, did you know that the US Government used Zyklon B on migrants at the border to disinfect them? They did:
Zyklon B arrived in El Paso in the 1920s courtesy of the US government. In 1929, for example, a Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, ordered $25 worth of the material–hydrocyanic acid in pellet form–as a fumigating agent for use at the El Paso delousing station, where Mexicans crossed the border from Juárez. Zyklon, developed by Degesch (short for the German vermin-combating corporation), was made in varying strengths, with Zyklon C, D and E representing gradations in potency and price. As Raul Hilberg describes it in The Destruction of the European Jews, “strength E was required for the eradication of specially resistant vermin, such as cockroaches, or for gassings in wooden barracks. The ‘normal’ preparation, D, was used to exterminate lice, mice, or rats in large, well-built structures containing furniture. Human organisms in gas chambers were killed with Zyklon B.” In 1929 Degesch divided the Zyklon market with an American corporation, Cyanamid, so Hurley likely got his shipment from the latter.
As David Dorado Romo describes it in his marvelous Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground History of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923 (Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B became available in the United States when, in the early 1920s, fears of alien infection were being inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them political “progressives.”
Donald Trump is a eugenecist. So is Stephen Miller. Just saying.