Brianna Nofil

This is totally at odds with everything we are claiming about civil liberties in the United States in this early Cold War moment.

Dressed in a powder blue suit and a dark blue top coat, she boarded the ferry that left Ellis Island at 7.30 o'clock.

Ten minutes later, reporters and photographers gathered around her as the ferry berthed at the Manhattan Pier.

The New York Times.

And they make this statement.

They say we are only going to use immigration detention in very exceptional circumstances.

I've got the quote from Eisenhower.

He says, through humane administration, the Department of Justice is doing what it legally can to alleviate hardships.

And he says the imprisonment of aliens awaiting admission or deportation has been stopped.

But what we start to see changing is that many of these sheriffs and these jails are not excited about the prospect of incarcerating European migrants.

And they are particularly not excited about the idea of incarcerating European women and children.

They say this is bringing us all sorts of bad publicity.

This isn't worth it, right?

The money is not worth all the negative publicity.

This is a major sea change.

And I think in a lot of ways, scholars have looked to this as a sort of hopeful moment, right?

If you were trying to kind of imagine what a world without immigration detention might look like, it's really quite powerful that the president essentially declared that he was discontinuing this practice altogether.

But there is, as there often is, a really big caveat.

Even as Eisenhower is proclaiming this era of humane immigration administration, he is really only talking about places like Ellis Island, places that mostly deal with Europeans.

Detention is rapidly expanding on the southern border.