Brianna Nofil

His exact line is he treats the Chinese migrants as pets.

The sheriff has very little incentive to make this a better situation.

All of these Chinese migrants, basically to the person, while they're detained in Malone, are filing habeas corpus claims.

They're saying that they are American citizens.

And they're saying they're being illegally detained because they are American citizens.

Interesting.

But they realized the courts 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.

What we start to see is that the Immigration Service starts calling sheriffs in 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 jails,

a 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.