In 1926, the Galveston League of Women Voters wrote to their U.S. senator to express concern over the “dreadful conditions which exist in regard to the detention of deportees in this part of the world.” The women referred to the Galveston County Jail—a squalid, perpetually louse-infested local lockup that received federal money for each migrant they held. The migrants at Galveston hailed from across the globe: They were Jewish refugees fleeing political violence, Estonian maritime workers absconding from ships, Mexicans accustomed to regularly crossing the border for work. They awaited immigration hearings, investigations, and deportations. And for weeks, months, and even years, they found themselves in an uneasy legal limbo, staring at the blank walls of the Galveston jail. It was “the dirtiest and rottenest place on earth,” a group of migrants wrote in 1930.
Similar detention arrangements were taking root throughout Texas and throughout the U.S. Outside of urban sites like Ellis Island, the federal government had little detention space of its own. Instead, it relied on contracts with sheriffs and localities to detain migrants in county jails. In some communities, these arrangements were popular and profitable, pumping federal money into local economies. But in other cases, they sparked pointed conversations about policing and punishment. What did it mean for Galveston County to incarcerate deportees, who in the words of the League of Women Voters, “have broken some law of this country … but are not in the true sense of the word criminals”?
Today, the relationship between localities and the federal immigration service is hotly contested in Texas, as the federal courts debate Governor Greg Abbott’s efforts to allow local law enforcement to arrest migrants on illegal entry charges, and as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to rent bed space in Texas jails for migrant detention. Yet these contemporary fights point to an enduring historical reality—mass deportations have long relied on local jails, local police power, and local community support. Even though immigration control is a federal responsibility, immigration officials have spent decades farming the dirty work of detention out to local partners (and later, to private corporations). Working with localities enabled the immigration service to insulate itself from some of detention’s worst abuses, arguing that episodes of violence and neglect were carried out by contractors rather than the federal government itself. Nowhere has this pattern been more evident than in Texas.