In 1926, the Galveston League of Women Voters sent a letter to U.S. senators expressing concern over “the appalling conditions that exist with regard to the detention of deportees in this part of the world.” The women mentioned the Galveston County Jail. The prison was a squalid, consistently lice-infested local jail that received federal funding for each immigrant it held. Galveston’s immigrants came from all over the world. They were Jewish refugees fleeing political violence, Estonian maritime workers fleeing ships, and Mexicans accustomed to regularly crossing the border for work. They were awaiting immigration hearings, investigations and deportation. And for weeks, months, even years, they found themselves in a precarious legal position, staring at the blank walls of the Galveston Jail. It was “the filthiest and most rotten place on earth,” a group of immigrants wrote in 1930.
Similar detention systems have taken hold across Texas and across the United States, and outside of urban centers like Ellis Island, the federal government has had little detention space of its own. Instead, it relied on contracts with sheriffs and local governments to hold immigrants in county jails. In some communities, these arrangements were popular and profitable, injecting federal funds into the local economy. But other cases have sparked pointed conversations about police and discipline. What did it mean for Galveston County to incarcerate deportees who, in the words of the League of Women Voters, “broke some of the laws of this land, but are not really criminals?” Or?
The relationship between local and federal immigration authorities is currently hotly contested in Texas, with a federal court debating Governor Greg Abbott’s effort to allow local police to arrest immigrants on suspicion of illegally entering the country. Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to take similar action. Rent bed space in Texas prisons for immigration detention. But these modern battles point to an enduring historical reality. In other words, mass deportations have long relied on local prisons, local police forces, and local community support. Although immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government, immigration authorities have spent decades outsourcing the dirty work of detention to local partners (and later private companies). By working with local governments, immigration officials were able to protect themselves from some of the worst abuses in detention, claiming that episodes of violence and neglect were perpetrated by contractors rather than the federal government itself. Nowhere is this pattern more evident than in Texas.
Texas sheriffs have worked with immigration authorities since the late 19th century to secure prison space and primarily to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned all Chinese workers from entering the United States. Supported. By the 1920s, states had to implement a number of new immigration laws, including anti-trafficking provisions, literacy tests, and quota laws that imposed significant restrictions on European immigration for the first time. As immigrant detainer populations became more diverse, more and more communities expressed hesitation about whether detaining immigrants was a worthwhile community project or even morally defensible. In the early 20th century, imprisoning Chinese immigrants may have seemed like an easy way to make money, but as immigration officials asked local governments to house European women, children, and families in prisons, it became much more expensive. It became controversial.
In addition to Europeans, Mexican immigrants were also increasing, and their numbers skyrocketed after the so-called Undesirable Alien Act was passed in 1929. This law made illegal entry a crime punishable by criminal penalties. Mexican immigrants wrote letters of citation from prison, lamenting that crossing the border meant sharing cells with “big criminals: bank robbers, murderers, thieves.” The Mexican government questioned why “crossing the river” became “an act that must be purged in prison, along with those who commit robbery and murder.” In Texas, as in other parts of the country, immigrants did not passively await deportation or tolerate prolonged detention. They contacted the consul, defaced the walls of their cells with calligraphy and drawings, filed habeas corpus petitions in court, planned their escape, and gathered sympathetic locals.
One of the most violent movements to detain immigrants took place in Galveston in the 1920s. The city had a history of prison reform movements and a strong community of Christian and Jewish religious leaders concerned about the status of immigrants. Most notably, however, the Galveston County Jail had a reputation for being a place where immigration authorities detained large numbers of European immigrants, sparking significant local outcry over the inadequacies of the jail. Although a Galveston grand jury declared prison detention a “crime against humanity” after a 1925 investigation into the confinement conditions of deportees, a local reporter claimed that “an unwelcome guest spent months in prison… He wrote about the dangers of “sending people back to their countries in anger.” Inside a stinking prison. ”
The situation facing detained female migrants was particularly precarious. Imprisoned immigrant women faced language barriers, impending deportation, little legal protection, and a heavy veil of suspicion that they were sex workers. In the spring of 1928, U.S. immigration judge Alvin M. Johnson found a Mexican woman named Gertrudis Hernandez de Rodriguez sitting in an office at the Galveston County Jail. When Johnson asked a local guard why the woman was there, he responded “with a confused look” that Hernandez de Rodriguez was crying and that he had taken her to the administration building. To the immigration officer, this seemed like an incomplete story. Johnson noted in the incident report that one of his colleagues had previously witnessed another unnamed prison employee “making love to (Hernandez)” in a prison office.
Three days later, the inspector found Hernandez de Rodriguez again, sitting disheveled in his room with the warden and another prison employee. The guard broke the awkward silence with a snide joke about how Mr. Hernández de Rodríguez wanted the immigration officer to “take him to the movies.” Guards in Galveston did not seem to expect punishment from immigration officials. Rather, their comments may be perceived as a winking invitation to participate in the assault on the detained women.
When immigrants made accusations of sexual misconduct against immigration officials during this era, immigration authorities spent considerable time investigating the allegations, even if the officials involved were rarely punished severely. Ta. However, when local guards were accused, immigration officials effectively turned their backs. They pointed out that they could not do the sheriff’s job and that “people with ambition…education and intelligence” could not work in prisons. The day after Johnson’s report, immigration authorities transferred Hernandez de Rodriguez to the Harris County Jail in Houston, about 50 miles away. This was also a characteristic of the power of detention. When problems arose, immigration authorities could effectively remove complainants by transferring them to local jails. This pattern continues in immigration detention today.
The relationship between Texas counties and immigration authorities changed rapidly over the next few years. By using city and county jails, immigration agents had a footprint in nearly every American community, a relationship that frustrated both federal and local authorities. With each additional federal investigation into conditions at the Galveston Jail, Sheriff R.E. Kirk’s frustration grew. In 1928, he informed the immigration authorities that they could take deportees elsewhere if they were not satisfied with the conditions. “[Kirk knows]there’s nowhere else to put them,” the immigration official said with a sigh.
In the 1940s and 1950s, immigration authorities experimented with building their own “detention camps” along the border. It can house thousands of migrants a night, almost all Mexicans. However, many local residents expressed concerns about these new arrangements, arguing that they were expanding the prison specifically to meet the demands of immigration authorities. McAllen-area Councilman Lloyd M. Bentsen asked how the town expected the Immigration Department to decide to “enter into the large-scale prison business.” Odessa newspapers posed similar questions. What will happen to Texas’ vast prisons when immigration authorities no longer need beds? “Apparently[Texas towns]have big prisons stuck and they can’t put anyone in there except each other. Immigration and Border Patrol prefer their own concentration camps.”
The mid-century detention landscape in Texas heralded a new era in which a vast network of local, federal, and private locations worked together to detain people the state deemed illegal. Bentsen’s observation that in 1952 the Immigration Service became a central player in the prison business was prescient. Even as ICE builds new detention facilities and contracts with private prison companies to operate them, its reliance on prisons in Texas and across the Gulf South continues. Today’s immigration detention system is far more expansive than the systems of the 1920s and 1950s, holding more than 12 times as many people in one night as immigration authorities did in 1950. However, much of the operational logic of the 20th century has survived. Detaining immigrants in county jails is a way for federal immigration authorities to foster cooperation with local communities, create financial incentives for cooperation, and keep immigrants inconspicuous as they move through vast cattle stations. There is.
