Ramtin Arablui

Oh, interesting.

This was actually a popular legal strategy at the time, even though very few of them were actually American citizens.

As illegal entry slowed down along the northern New York border, some counties which had relied on money from the federal government made pleas to bring back Chinese detainees.

St.

Lawrence County, just to the west of Franklin County, went as far as to adopt a resolution claiming they were being discriminated against by not receiving more Chinese immigrants.

Franklin and other neighboring counties would continue detaining people into the early 20th century, but never at the level they first did.

What does it foreshadow about the future of migrant detention in the United States?

After World War II, Mexican migrants became a target of deportation.

They had been encouraged to come to the U.S.

legally during the war through the Bracero program, which allowed them to work on farms, planting and harvesting crops.

But the agricultural industry also hired Mexican migrants who had entered illegally so they could pay them less.

Now, in 1954, the Eisenhower administration began what would become the largest deportation campaign in U.S.

history, known as Operation Wetback, a derogatory racial epithet widely used at the time.

So then how did the Eisenhower administration claim that the United States government is ending detention?

The federal government data on Mexican detention was not consistent, and officials would sometimes categorize Mexican migrants separately to make the point that they'd abolished detention.

The Justice Department and its Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, had been trying for a few years to convince Congress to give them more money to ramp up detentions and deportations of Mexican migrants along the border.

And this included building federal detention centers.

And they wanted to put one near the southern tip of Texas, in the city of Brownsville, which already had contracts with the feds to hold migrants in its jail.

Congressman Lloyd Benson, whose district covered Roundsville, addressed Congress, saying that counties will be, quote, left holding the bag because the Immigration Bureau decides it wants to increase its staff and duties and go into the prison business on a grandiose scale.

It seemed like everything was working against the federal government's proposal in Brownsville.