Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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In 1903, a reporter named Pulteney Bigelow stumbled across a story in upstate New York.
The part of New York that is right along the Canadian border.
A rural town in Franklin County called Malone, where he starts talking with locals.
And they tell him this route from Canada into northern New York has become this sort of vastly underreported secret passage of illegal entry into the United States for Chinese migrants.
Like, why is that a pathway? Is it easier to get into Canada at that time?
Yeah, it's a super intentional choice. So this is about 20 years after the U.S. passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which bars Chinese laborers basically entirely from legal immigration to the United States. So for many Chinese migrants who are still looking for a path in, this is one of their best options. Oh, interesting. They take a boat to Vancouver.
They take a train across the entire length of Canada.
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Chapter 2: What historical context led to the U.S. immigration detention system?
They stop over in Montreal, where there are Chinese communities that coach them, that help them cross the border. And then they cross this just incredibly rural, isolated sort of path into northern New York.
That takes us back to the reporter, Pulteney Bigelow, who starts asking around. And people in Malone tell him, go look at the county jail.
He arrives at the county jail, and the county jail is filled, is packed to the brim with Chinese migrants.
The sheriff took me into the jail, where were about 30 Chinamen awaiting trial.
They basically stashed people in the attic of this jail, which was never intended to hold people at all.
In the yard was a massive refuse that never would have been allowed to accumulate in a decent family.
He is sort of stunned by what he sees.
There were no outdoor recreation grounds, no place for a daily walk. Two of the big window panes were broken and had been repaired by stuffing in old rags or newspapers.
It's a sort of quite brutal form of warehousing from its earliest incarnations. And Bigelow writes in his dispatch, right, he says, these people are not being held because they're accused of committing a crime. These are not the people we expect to find in a local jail, right?
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Chapter 3: How did local jails become involved in immigration detention?
So then how did the Eisenhower administration claim that the United States government is ending detention?
So the Immigration Service is quite intentional.
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.
they're often seen as sort of not really immigrants. The Immigration Service sees immigrants as people who come and stay permanently, and they see Mexicans as seasonal workers. They see Mexicans as people who come and go. But the Immigration Service is able to say, this is like a separate category of person that doesn't really count for what we're doing.
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.
So when they announced plans to build this federal camp in Brownsville, the government is pretty shocked that they get so much pushback from localities. Some of it is about conditions, some of it is about the morality, but a lot of it is localities saying, listen, we built bigger jails in our communities because the immigration service told us they needed that space.
Much of the opposition to the building of a federal detention camp is based on the claim that county jails have expended money to enlarge the jails and improve the facilities to meet federal requirements.
The Brownsville Herald.
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Chapter 4: What role did the sheriff's financial incentives play in detention practices?
Immigration detention is a deeply bipartisan project. Like this is absolutely not a story about sort of Republicans expanding it and Democrats trying to roll it back. This is a story about both parties coming to a consensus, right?
That migration is criminal and that it like should be punished or administered through the same infrastructure and systems that we use to punish, you know, people who we have moved through the criminal legal system.
Thank you.
That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah.
And I'm Ramteen Arablui. You've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Lawrence Wu.
Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim.
Devin Katayama.
Sarah Wyman.
Irene Noguchi.
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