Brianna Nofil

It is actively commoditizing people.

And, you know, the people who are making money off of this see that they are fighting for these contracts from the federal government.

People have real ethical and moral quandaries about this.

People are uncomfortable from the very beginning, even in places like Malone, about what is happening here.

And I think that sort of public concern spikes when deaths happen while people are awaiting these hearings and deportations.

So this is a quote from a newspaper called The Malone Farmer.

The present Chinese exclusion law and its administration is a shame upon civilized government.

They go on to say there ought to be some other way of handling them other than placing them behind locked doors and barred windows.

Once enough people find out that this migration route is a thing, it's kind of a good indication that it's time to move on.

So right around this period, too, we're going to see most Chinese migrants are going to start entering through Mexico rather than Canada.

I think what it foreshadows is that the Immigration Service in these years, but also today, their mandate is gargantuan.

Their task at the turn of the 20th century is to bar Chinese immigrants from this huge country.

They're incredibly, incredibly small as an agency.

they realize that in order to make deportations happen, they need collaborators.

And some of their best collaborators, the collaborators they are most interested in pursuing, is sheriffs and local law enforcement.

The sort of Ellis Island that we think of is of distant memory.

It is basically, by the 40s, a site of long-term detention for people who the U.S.

fears are subversive.

And she kind of becomes this celebrity, emblematic of the excesses of detention power.

activists are going to use the language of.