Brianna Nofil

criminal justice system operating in any way.

These people aren't accused of anything, but they are sitting in our jails for months on end.

I'm an assistant professor of history at William & Mary, and my book is called The Migrant's Jail, An American History of Mass Incarceration.

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.

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.

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 routes 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.

Hey, Lulu here.

Whether we are romping through science, music, politics, technology, or feelings, we seek to leave you seeing the world anew.

Radiolab adventures right on the edge of what we think we know wherever you get podcasts.

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.

The sheriff is a guy named Ernest Douglas.