Who profits from migrant detention?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This message comes from 48 Hours with the 48 Hours Post-Mortem Podcast. Host Anne-Marie Green joins producers and correspondents to discuss key evidence, dead ends, and stranger-than-fiction twists they faced in the field. Listen on your favorite podcast app.
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.
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? He says they are being held administratively by the immigration service because they are awaiting immigration hearings and they are awaiting potential deportations.
We put them in jail first and let them prove their innocence afterward.
And these are words coming from a guy who doesn't necessarily like Chinese people. In the same article, he makes it very clear he believes in white supremacy. But he also believed the immigration system wasn't working like it should.
So he says there is like something really strange happening here. Something that does not resemble how we sort of imagine the U.S. criminal justice system operating in any way.
I have no hesitation in pronouncing our present means of excluding Chinamen as one gigantic and complicated fraud.
These people aren't accused of anything, but they are sitting in our jails for months on end.
This is Brianna Nofil.
I'm an assistant professor of history at William & Mary, and my book is called The Migrant's Jail, An American History of Mass Incarceration.
Brianna grew up in South Florida, near a federal immigration detention center.
People would say, there's folks out there. It's down this one little road that goes into the Everglades. It's kind of like a prison, but it's kind of not.
It's called Chrome. It was an old missile base turned into a migrant detention facility in the 1980s. As an adult, Brianna got interested in what it was used for, who ran it, who lived there.
So I really started with that question of like, what was this weird place in our community? And it kind of spiraled out from there.
And what she found was that for as long as the federal government has restricted immigration, it's struggled to find enough space, which is why it's often relied on local county jails in rural communities like the one in Franklin County, New York, to help them out.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:19
2
What historical context led to the U.S. immigration detention system?
1:19–24:25
3
How did local jails become involved in immigration detention?
24:25–49:18
4
What role did the sheriff's financial incentives play in detention practices?
49:18–50:58