Randa Abdel-Fattah

At the time, the U.S.

was worried about the influx of immigrants after World War I, significantly from Eastern European countries, but also from Asian and other non-white countries, too.

Money and bad publicity were reasons why Eisenhower wanted to stop long-term immigration detention in the mid-50s.

and instead, paroling people into the U.S.

while their immigration status was pending.

The Brownsville Herald.

Coming up, the golden handcuffs of migrant detention.

The inmates have been communicating some of their demands on hand-painted signs.

In 1987, Cuban immigrants detained in two facilities, one in Atlanta and another in a small rural community of Oakdale, Louisiana, took over their detention centers.

holding guards hostage in both locations.

The U.S.

had welcomed refugees coming over on the Mariel Boatlift in 1980 when tens of thousands of Cuban immigrants fled Castro's repressive government to seek asylum.

Many of them had become permanent residents in the U.S.,

This is Brianna Nofil, author of The Migrant's Jail, An American History of Mass Incarceration.

the U.S.

government had been preparing for something like this.

A few years before these 1987 uprisings, the federal government, led by a young associate attorney general named Rudy Giuliani, had secured funding to build permanent detention centers, a collaboration between the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Bureau of Prisons.

Now, they just needed somewhere to build them.

That made Mayor George Moad fight hard to bring the federal government's new $17.5 million alien detention center to Oakdale.

But shortly after the Oakdale Detention Center opened in April of 1986, it would receive a group of Cuban immigrants who were deemed excludable from residing in the U.S.