Brianna Nofil

The part of New York that is right along the Canadian border.

And they tell him this route from Canada into northern New York has become this sort of vastly underreported secret passage of illegal entry into the United States for Chinese migrants.

Yeah, it's a super intentional 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.

So for many Chinese migrants who are still looking for a path in, this is one of their best options.

Oh, 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.

He arrives at the county jail, and the county jail is filled, is packed to the brim with Chinese migrants.

They basically stashed people in the attic of this jail, which was never intended to hold people at all.

He is sort of stunned by what he sees.

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.

So he says there is like something really strange happening here.

Something that does not resemble how we sort of imagine the U.S.