The boats were stiflingly hot in the day and freezing cold at night. Much of the upper deck was exposed to the elements, leaving passengers drenched by rain and high waves during storms. Some preferred this to below decks; here, passengers were squeezed in like sardines, well beyond standard capacity, in a dirty hold that was meant to store bananas for transport, not people. No beds or bunks were provided, so they used life jackets as pillows, if they were lucky enough to find any. Seasickness was a constant companion. Some jumped overboard, preferring to try their luck at swimming to shore or just wanting to end their misery more quickly.
In the 1950s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) partnered with private companies and the Mexican government to use these “hell ships,” as one newspaper called them, to deport 10s of thousands of Mexican immigrants, shuttling them across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Veracruz. The practice ended only after a fateful journey, in 1956, in which deportees mutinied and several passengers lost their lives jumping overboard. This drew attention from the Mexican press and American lawmakers who pushed for investigations. In defending the “hell ships,” US government officials pointed to the “character and type of individual being transported.” Under this logic, they felt it acceptable to cram migrants into inhumane conditions because, as one official noted, “the wetback, by and large, has never been accustomed to the necessities of life, much less luxuries.” And officials were up-front about the intentional trauma inflicted: such a journey, they stated, “served to teach [the migrants] a lesson.” The INS commissioner was almost gleeful in his assessment: “They get out and they get seasick and the boat lift is the most salutary thing that we have hit on yet.”
Much of the outrage against the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants and people of color (and its flouting of ethical norms generally) centered on a rallying cry: “It’s not normal.” But two recent books remind us that Donald Trump’s approach to immigration policy was not an aberration; instead, it was the logical outgrowth of more than a century of racialized exclusion and casual brutality in the treatment of migrants. Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants and A. Naomi Paik’s Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding US Immigration for the Twenty-First Century both demonstrate that the United States has a long history of state-sanctioned cruelty, all in the name of immigration control. The story of the INS boatlifts, as recounted in Goodman’s book, is just one such episode. There are many historical precursors to putting kids in cages. As Paik asserts, “The problem is not Donald Trump. The problem is the United States of America.”