Randa Abdel-Fattah

The Department of Justice now oversaw immigration in the U.S., hoping it would provide better oversight than the Department of Labor.

This is Brianna Nofil, author of The Migrant's Jail, an American history of mass incarceration.

Communists, fascists, or people like Ellen Knopf.

Knopf was German-born, but left when Hitler rose to power.

She would eventually end up a refugee in England, serving in the Royal Air Force, where she met and married an American serviceman, and then found herself stuck on Ellis Island and in the middle of a controversy.

Why was the government detaining Knopf without disclosing why?

Ellis Island, by this time in the late 1940s, had become less of a processing center granting access to the country and more of a detention center where people would stay months or, in the case of Ellen Knopf, two years while awaiting a court hearing.

— Knopf's case would eventually make it all the way to the U.S.

Supreme Court, which ruled that the U.S.

government could deny Knopf entry and didn't have to disclose why.

But pressure continued.

And after almost two years of being detained, she was granted an immigration hearing, where witnesses testified she was a communist spy.

—

But the evidence didn't hold up, and in November of 1951, she left Ellis Island, admitted for permanent residence.

Knopf's story happened under President Harry Truman.

But in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower's administration would take immigration policy in a new direction.

Those circumstances included detaining people who were, quote, likely to abscond or those whose freedom of movement could be adverse to the national security or the public safety.

Instead, immigrants coming to the U.S.

would be released on, quote, "...conditional parole or bond or supervision."

Brianna says this move by Eisenhower reminded her of what happened after the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which set quotas for how many people could enter from a particular country.